LVIV. July 29 (Interfax-Ukraine) - Ukraine has announced Monday, July 29 as a day of mourning for the victims of the plane crash that occurred during the air show in Lviv on July 27.
Wake services for the victims of the plane crash was held at the Sknyliv military airfield outside Lviv on Monday.
Clergymen from the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church conducted the services, an over 200 people attended.
The trail left by the falling SU-27 Flanker jet was covered with flowers, wreaths and lit candles. People keep carrying flowers to the airfield, and more flowers are expected to come all day long.
There were few relatives of the dead at the service because most of them are identifying the remains and organizing funerals.
The bodies of 45 victims are being buried on Monday. Burial sites have been prepared at three cemeteries in Lviv. There will be burials in the Horodok, Busk, Pustomyty and Zhovkva districts of the Lviv region on the same day. An entire family - the mother, father and two children - will be buried in Semyonovka village in the Pustomyty district.
Seventy victims of the crash are undergoing treatment in Lviv hospitals. Twenty-one of them are in critical condition, 41 are in moderately serious condition and eight are in stable condition.
There is inconsistent information about the number of identified victims. In the morning, the Ukrainian Ministry for Civil Defense and Emergencies reported that 75 of the 83 victims had been identified. At 13:00 local time, the Lviv department of the ministry said that 72 had been identified.
The names of the 72 identified victims have been released. There are many children among them, and the youngest is a 12-month- old baby.
Lviv resident Nina Veselova, who was on the list of victims, appears to be alive. She came to the ministry after she had read her name on the casualty list. Veselova said she lost her passport in the panic that followed the crash at the air show.
The Ukrainian Defense Ministry suspended all warplane flights, except the flights to be made by on-duty aircraft, in connection with the SU-27 jet crash in Lviv. In the future, instructions will be issued to resume the flights.
The pilots who ejected from a SU-27 jet before it crashed during the air show have been transferred from a Lviv hospital to a military medical center in Vinnytsia. Pilots Volodymyr Toponar and Yuriy Yegorov are being treated in the intensive care department. They suffered spine injuries and remained in shock after the accident.
Prosecutors instituted criminal proceedings against the pilots on July 28.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Anatoliy Kinakh has authorized the immediate transfer of money for the funerals of the Lviv crash victims and medical treatment for the survivors. He said he would personally control the transfer and spending of the money.
Earlier, the Ukrainian government allocated UAH10m (USD1.9m) for the crash clean-up.
Ukrainian politicians are trying to make sense of what happened.
For instance, former defense minister and current parliament deputy Oleksandr Kuzmuk described the crash as an awful tragedy and an enormous blow to the army's authority. "The armed forces have always tried to prove that they are worthy of their people, but after this tragedy it will take long to restore that authority and our good name," Kuzmuk said.
He thinks the Lviv tragedy resulted from negligence and does not exclude a technical failure. "Experts will have the final say. But I can confirm that machinery of the Ukrainian armed forces has grown outdated. I spoke about that at a session of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, which took place the day before the tragedy. I said we must make related decisions. All of us witnessed the results of the condition of the machinery on the next day."
Kuzmuk tendered his resignation in October 2001, after the TU- 154 Careless air crash caused by a Ukrainian missile.
Meanwhile, the judgments of Ukrainian Communist Party leader Petro Simonenko were much tougher. He blamed the Lviv air show tragedy on the authorities' inadequacies.
"The tragedy in Lviv is a predictable result of the negligence, irresponsibility and sloppiness permeating Ukraine in the past ten years. The air crash demonstrated that military pilots have lost their professional aptitude and are no longer able to carry out their tasks, and that the country on a whole has lost its defense capabilities," Simonenko told Interfax on Monday.
Ukraine should not stage air shows when three to five of its warplanes are airworthy and "the rest are in cobwebs," he said.
Basic safety rules were violated during the event, he said. During the Soviet era, warplanes were banned from public air shows, he said.
An SU-27 UB fighter jet fell on spectators while performing aerobatics stunts at the Lviv air show on July 27. The two pilots ejected from the jet and survived.
The tragedy at the Lviv air show has no precedents in world events. Before this, the crash of an Italian plane at an air show in Germany in 1988 was considered the worst. At that time, 70 people died.