What Ukraine's air crash left behind by 28 September 2020

What did Ukraine have left to say on 28 September 2020, three days after one of its military training flights ended in disaster? The country was still absorbing the loss of the An-26Sh that came down near Chuhuiv in Kharkiv Oblast on 25 September 2020.

The aircraft was on a training flight and was approaching to land when it crashed, as reported at the time. Those aboard included cadets from Kharkiv Air Force University. The first reports said more than 20 people had died. The toll was later given as 26 dead and one other person wounded.

Background on the crash adds that 27 people were on board and one survived. The plane, tail number 76, belonged to the 203rd Training Aviation Brigade, and it was destroyed.

Ukraine declared 26 September 2020 a Day of Mourning. By 28 September, the first working day after that pause, the question facing the country was no longer only how the plane had come down, but how to account for the young people who had been training to fly.

The human weight of the story lay in who was aboard. These were cadets, still in training, on a routine exercise rather than an operation. That is why the crash resonated in a country where the air force university in Kharkiv is a place of learning as much as a military institution.

This retrospective sets down what was known by 28 September 2020: the place, the aircraft, the unit, the toll and the national mourning.