A Ukrainian businessman is turning scraps of wreckage from a downed Russian fighter plane into souvenir key.
A Ukrainian makes keychains from Russian fighter plane wreckage to fund war effort.
“Many of my friends tell me: ‘US$1,000 – nobody will give you this for this piece of metal, it’s crazy,'” said Iurii Vysoven, founder of Drones for Ukraine.
“In the morning, I woke up and understand on my phone (that) it’s already (US$20,000 to) US$30,000 collected, and we see this constant flow of messages of people asking questions and telling (us that) they want to donate more, they tell us it is an incredible idea.”
The aircraft is a Russian Su-34 two-seater tactical fighter-bomber that the Ukrainian military says it shot down over the town of Borodianka, north-west of Kyiv, early in March, when Russian forces were trying to capture and hold the area.
Ukraine’s defence ministry has posted images of the wreckage, which it says had the tail number RF-81251 and the call sign 31 Red.
The soldiers told him that both the aircraft’s pilots had been killed. Among the wreckage shown by the ministry was a helmet stencilled in Russian with the last three letters of a surname ending “-NOV”, and an empty leather holster marked “Buryat” – the name of an ethnic group that lives in Siberia.