Authorities in Ukraine have discovered the remains of eight British Hurricane fighter planes dating back to the second world war.
The aircraft, found near an unexploded bomb dating from the same conflict in a forest south of Kyiv, were sent to the Soviet Union by Britain after Nazi Germany invaded the country in 1941.
“It is very rare to find this aircraft in Ukraine,” Oleks Shtan, a former airline pilot who is leading the excavation, told the BBC. “It’s very important for our aviation history because no lend-lease aircraft have been found here before.”
The Hurricanes, which shot down more than half of all German aircraft during the Battle of Britain, were part of a package of about 3,000 fighter planes delivered to the USSR between 1941 and 1944 to support the Soviet war effort.
“The Hurricane was a strong, easy to fly machine,” Shtan says. “It was stable as a gun platform and suitable for inexperienced pilots. A reliable aircraft.”
The rusting remains of the aircraft had been stripped of their most valuable components, including radios and machine guns, and dragged to the woodland.
According to historians, some of these aircraft were deliberately broken up and buried after the war so the Soviets did not have to pay back the US, as under lend-lease legislation Moscow was required to pay for any donated military equipment that remained intact.
Ukraine’s National Aviation Museum is aiming to reassemble the Hurricanes and put them on display.
“The Hurricanes are a symbol of British assistance during the years of the second world war, just as we are very appreciative of British assistance nowadays,” Valerii Romanenko, the head of research at the museum, told the BBC. “The UK is one of the largest suppliers of military equipment to our country now.”
In mid-June, the emptying of the vast reservoir along the Dnipro River as a result of the destruction of the Kakhovka dam uncovered mudflats littered with skeletons, according to footage posted online.
Historians say some of the remains may be of people who died in a huge battle fought 80 years ago over the same terrain now at the centre of Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russian occupation, around Nikopol and Kamianka-Dniprovska.
The battle of the Dnipro – or Dnieper, in the Russian version – was the focus of one of the biggest military operations of the second world war, the Soviet army’s counterattack against the German army, involving more than 6 million troops.
