Aleksander Otroshchenko, commander of the 45th Air Force and Air Defense Army of the Northern Fleet, died in an accident, said Andrey Chibis, governor of the northern Murmansk region where the fleet's base is located. A military transport plane An-26 crashed into a cliff in Crimea on March 31. The Russian Ministry of Defense announced shortly after the accident that the preliminary cause was a technical failure. The An-26 has been in use since the late 1960s and has also been used in civil aviation for cargo transport, but this model has been involved in a series of fatal accidents over the past decade. A Ukrainian An-26 crashed during a flight in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region in 2022, killing one person. Another plane crashed during a training flight in northeastern Ukraine in 2020, killing 26 of the 27 people on board. Eight people, including five Russians, died when an An-26 crashed in South Sudan in 2020. Four of the 10 people on board were killed when an An-26 crashed while landing in Ivory Coast in West Africa in 2017.