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What happened on 8 January 2020 near Tehran?
Summary
A look back at a day marked by an air disaster involving a Ukrainian airline and the opening of a gas pipeline.
What did 8 January 2020 bring for Ukraine and its neighbours? Two very different events marked the date.
Near Tehran, in Iran, a plane operated by the Ukrainian airline MAU crashed. All 176 people on board died. For Ukraine, the loss was immediate and national in scale, since the aircraft belonged to a Ukrainian carrier.
On the same day, the heads of state of Turkey, Russia, Serbia and Bulgaria formally inaugurated the TurkStream gas pipelines. The ceremony involved four countries, two of which, Serbia and Bulgaria, are in Ukraine's wider region.
The two events were reported separately, and the reports link neither to the other. Taken together, they show how a single date could carry both a tragedy touching Ukraine directly and an energy development in the neighbourhood. The crash was the larger human story of the day, while the pipeline inauguration was a formal act by four heads of state.
