India’s federal anti-terror agency has told a Delhi court it holds “credible information” that six Ukrainians and one American already in Tihar Jail were involved in a February drone strike on a passenger aircraft in Myanmar. The claim is an allegation inside an ongoing investigation, not a verdict. Kyiv has rejected any state role and demanded its citizens be released.
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Key Takeaways by Planet Today
What the court was told: On 19 August 2026 the National Investigation Agency said the Indian government had received credible information linking certain Ukrainian and U.S. nationals to a drone attack on a civilian aircraft in Myanmar. A special judge on 31 August allowed jail interrogation of two of the seven men held since March.
What happened in Myanmar: On 20 February 2026 a Myanmar National Airlines ATR-72-600 (XY-AMI) was damaged at Myitkyina Airport while passengers boarded a flight to Mandalay. Aviation and local reports described first-person-view drones striking the nose, mid-fuselage and tail. No passengers or crew were reported injured.
What remains unproven: The NIA has not published forensic proof tying the seven detainees personally to the Myitkyina strike. The junta blamed the Kachin Independence Army and People’s Defence Force; a KIA spokesman denied a policy of attacking civilian aircraft. Some local accounts said a drone aimed at a nearby military headquarters may have hit the airliner after ground fire.
Why New Delhi cares: Investigators argue the same ethnic armed groups that fight Myanmar’s junta have supplied weapons and training to banned Indian insurgent outfits along the Mizoram–Chin frontier. That is the stated national-security hook, not a finding that Ukraine’s government directed the operation.
Diplomatic split: Ukraine’s foreign ministry said in March there were “no established facts” of unlawful activity and asked India to free the six Ukrainians. The United States embassy said it was aware of the case and declined further comment. The men remain in judicial custody under India’s Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.
What the NIA Put on the Court Record
The latest details reached the public through The Indian Express on 3–4 September 2026, then through India Today, NDTV and The Independent. Those reports quote an NIA application dated 19 August.
“The Central Government has received credible information indicating the involvement of certain Ukrainian and US Nationals in a drone attack on a civilian aircraft in Myanmar.”
That sentence is the core of the new claim. It is not a completed trial finding. Special Judge Prashant Sharma granted the agency permission to question two of the accused inside Tihar Jail: Ukrainian national Viktor Kaminskyi and U.S. citizen Matthew Aaron VanDyke. The agency said it wanted to confront them with witness statements, device data and details of “masterminds sitting in Myanmar.”
The seven men arrested on 13 March 2026 are Matthew Aaron VanDyke (United States), detained at Kolkata airport, and Viktor Kaminskyi, Petro Hurba, Taras Slyviak, Ivan Sukmanovskyi, Marian Stefankiv and Maksim Honcharuk (Ukraine), detained at Lucknow and Delhi airports.
They have been held under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. The NIA’s earlier case, filed in March, alleged that they entered the restricted northeastern state of Mizoram without a Restricted Area Permit or Protected Area Permit, crossed into Myanmar, and trained ethnic armed groups in drone operations, assembly and jamming. The agency also alleged that drone consignments from Europe were routed through India into Mizoram and onward across the border.
According to the same filings, fourteen Ukrainians in total entered India on tourist visas on different dates, flew to Guwahati, and then moved toward the Myanmar frontier. Seven of that larger group have not been publicly accounted for in open court papers. The NIA says digital devices seized from the arrested men contain images, video and voice samples that still require corroboration through questioning.
The February Strike at Myitkyina
The aircraft incident itself is independently documented. On the evening of 20 February 2026, around 8:12 p.m. local time, a Myanmar National Airlines ATR-72-600 registered XY-AMI was boarding passengers for a domestic service from Myitkyina to Mandalay. Aviation trade outlets including FlightGlobal, AeroTime and ch-aviation reported that first-person-view drones struck the aircraft. Photographs circulated of damage to the nose area near the cockpit, the mid-fuselage and the tail. Airport operations were suspended. No injuries were reported.
Myanmar’s military government called the strike a “terrorist attack” by the Kachin Independence Army and allied People’s Defence Force units and labeled it a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. A KIA spokesman, Colonel Naw Bu, told the BBC the group does not target civilian aircraft and denied responsibility. Burma News International / Mizzima later carried a local account that the intended target may have been the Northern Command headquarters west of the airport, and that ground fire may have sent a drone into the airliner instead.
Those two versions matter. One describes a deliberate attack on a passenger aircraft. The other describes a military target nearby and an aircraft hit in the confusion. The NIA filing does not publicly resolve that dispute. It asserts involvement of “certain Ukrainian and US nationals” in “a drone attack on a civilian aircraft,” without releasing the raw intelligence that the Indian government says it received.
Who Matthew VanDyke Is — and What That Does Not Prove
VanDyke is a public figure, which is why Indian and Western headlines have clustered around his name. He is a Maryland-born filmmaker and founder of Sons of Liberty International, an organization that has advertised military training for groups in conflict zones. He was detained in Libya in 2011 while covering, and later fighting alongside, rebels against Muammar Gaddafi. That biography is a matter of public record. It is not, by itself, proof that he directed the Myitkyina strike.
Indian agencies have described him in court papers as a mercenary and have spoken of a “Matthew Van Dyke module” through which drones were allegedly supplied to Myanmar-based groups. Those are investigator characterizations. VanDyke’s lawyers have objected to aspects of the jail interrogation request. In July a court allowed him special food and a cook after he complained that spicy prison meals affected his health, but refused private-hospital treatment and direct family communication in the United States.
The six Ukrainians have been described in some Indian coverage as veterans familiar with drone operations from the war in their own country. That is a plausible skill set in 2026. It is not the same as a finding that the Ukrainian state dispatched them. Private veterans, contractors and adventurers have appeared in several wars over the past decade. Distinguishing freelance activity from official policy is the entire point of an investigation — and it has not been completed.
What Mainstream Outlets Are Saying
Indian national media treated the 4 September wave as a court-document story, not as a closed case. The Indian Express, India Today, NDTV, News18 and Outlook quoted the NIA application and named the accused. Reuters had already reported the March arrests and Ukraine’s protest. The Independent summarized the September filing for an international audience and noted VanDyke’s earlier work as a journalist and filmmaker.
The common frame in these outlets is institutional: India’s counter-terror agency is expanding an existing UAPA case from illegal border crossing and alleged training into a specific incident — the Myitkyina aircraft strike — based on information the central government says is credible. Most of these reports keep the word “alleged” in the headline or the first paragraph. That is the responsible version of the mainstream account.
Aviation desks in February had already established the physical facts of the strike without any Indian arrest story attached. That earlier layer of reporting is useful. It shows the plane was hit, the airport closed, and the junta and the KIA offered opposite explanations months before the NIA named foreign trainers in a Delhi courtroom.
What Alternative and State-Aligned Outlets Are Saying
RT’s India desk published the same court-filing facts on 4 September, using the Indian Express as its cited source for the documents. The RT version leans harder on the word “mercenaries” and on the implication of a Ukraine-linked drone pipeline into Southeast Asia. That editorial tilt is predictable. RT is a Russian state-funded outlet operating under wartime information conditions. It is not an independent court of first instance.
Some Indian and regional commentators have gone further than the NIA papers, writing of “black ops,” military-intelligence footprints, or a Ukrainian export of drone know-how as official policy. Open-source essays of that kind circulate. They have not been adopted as findings by the Delhi court. Kyiv’s March statement remains the official Ukrainian line: no established facts of unlawful activity, and a demand for release and consular access.
Readers should hold two ideas at once. First, the NIA is a competent federal agency with a real case file, seized devices, and a judge’s permission to keep questioning two prisoners. Second, “credible information” in an application is a legal phrase used to justify more interrogation. It is not the same as a published forensic chain from a specific drone at Myitkyina to a named man in Tihar.
Why the Mizoram Corridor Matters to India
Geography explains the intensity of New Delhi’s interest more clearly than any slogan about Ukraine. Mizoram shares a long, poorly policed border with Myanmar’s Chin State. Foreigners need special permits to enter much of India’s Northeast. The NIA says the group skipped those permits, used tourist visas as cover, and treated India as a land bridge.
Indian security services have long argued that some Myanmar-based ethnic armed groups maintain relationships with banned insurgent organizations on the Indian side — supplying weapons, hardware and training. If that assessment is accurate, then foreign trainers who strengthen those Myanmar groups are, in New Delhi’s view, a second-order threat to Indian territory. That is a national-security argument about a border, not a commentary on the justice of Myanmar’s civil war.
Myanmar has been in open conflict since the 2021 coup. Ethnic armies and People’s Defence Force units have taken towns, lost them, and adopted small attack drones as a cheap equalizer against an air force the junta still controls. The spread of those systems from Europe and from other war zones into that fight is a documented trend. Whether the seven men in Tihar were central to it, peripheral, or misidentified is exactly what the interrogation is supposed to test.
Kyiv, Washington and the Limits of the Record
Ukraine’s foreign ministry, after the March arrests, said there were “no established facts proving the involvement of the said Ukrainian citizens in unlawful activities on the territory of India or Myanmar.” Ambassador Oleksandr Polishchuk delivered a protest note in New Delhi and asked for immediate release and access. That position has not been publicly withdrawn.
The U.S. embassy said it was aware of VanDyke’s detention and offered no further comment. Silence from Washington is not an endorsement of the NIA theory. It is also not a rebuttal. Consular practice in terrorism-statute cases is often quiet until charges crystallize or a plea is negotiated.
No public statement from the NIA or the Delhi court has accused the Ukrainian state of ordering the Myitkyina strike. The charging theory, as reported, is that private actors used Indian territory to reach Myanmar groups, and that some of those groups later — or in parallel — used drones against a civilian aircraft. Readers who collapse that into “Ukraine attacked a passenger plane” are running ahead of the evidence. Readers who dismiss the entire file because RT also covered it are making the opposite error.
What a Serious Investigation Still Has to Show
Several questions are still open in the public record. Which specific piece of “credible information” ties named detainees to the 20 February strike, as opposed to general training activity in the weeks around it? Do device images and videos show the Myitkyina apron, the ATR-72, or only training sites elsewhere in Kachin or Chin territory? Where are the other seven Ukrainians the NIA says entered India on the same pattern? If ethnic armed groups received European drones via Mizoram, who paid for them, and through which companies or informal networks? Does any evidence show contact with banned Indian insurgent groups, or only with Myanmar outfits that Indian agencies believe sometimes help those groups?
Until those points are tested in a charge sheet and, if the case proceeds, in open court, the responsible description is the one the NIA itself used: credible information, an application to interrogate, an ongoing conspiracy theory in the legal sense of that word.