Military vehicle runs over civilian car in Makhachkala, killing one

On Thursday, a military armoured personnel carrier ran over a car in Daghestan’s capital city Makhachkala, killing the car’s driver and injuring its passenger.

The video of the incident, which occurred on the Karabudakhkent highway, was first published by the Kaspiysk 24 Telegram channel. The footage showed passers-by flanking the crushed Lada Priora, while law enforcement officers stopped an armoured personnel carrier not far from it. The author of the video claimed that the armoured personnel carrier had run over the car.

Telegram channel 112, associated with the security forces, specified that the vehicles collided at a pedestrian crossing, where the driver of the Lada Priora had slowed down.

Daghestan’s Interior Ministry confirmed the accident and the death of the car’s driver in their initial report, but did not specify what other vehicle was party to the incident.

Later, the Interior Ministry released another report, identifying a ‘38-year-old local resident’ who was ‘driving an armoured personnel carrier BTR 80’.

‘According to preliminary information, due to failure to observe the distance to the vehicle moving ahead, [the armoured personnel carrier] collided with the car Lada Priora under the control of a 42-year-old resident of Makhachkala, stopped at a [red light]’, the agency said in a statement.

An eyewitness of the accident told OC Media that the cause of the accident was unclear, and that no one had time to realise what had happened.

‘Everyone was saying that the armoured personnel carrier’s brakes had failed’, the eyewitness said.

He also noted that the armoured personnel carrier eventually managed to stop 150 metres away from the crash site.

The Russian Investigative Committee Department in Daghestan has not yet opened a criminal case, stating that only a ‘procedural check’ is underway.

The Head of Daghestan, Sergei Melikov, expressed his condolences to the family of the victim, adding that ‘the circumstances of the incident are now being clarified’.

Over the past three years, military vehicles have often been involved in fatal accidents, but in most cases the authorities do not comment on these events, and the accidents themselves are not included in the relevant reports. Such accidents are especially frequent in the western Russian region of Belgorod bordering Ukraine.

In August 2024, a military truck, which was travelling at high speeds, collided first with a civilian vehicle in an oncoming lane, before crashing into a car in which a woman and her young daughter were travelling in the Belgorod Region. At the time, local publications wrote that investigators told the relatives that the accident was ‘nobody’s fault’, while media reported that they were forbidden to ‘publish accidents involving military equipment’.

Earlier in 2024, also in the Belgorod region, drunken military officers driving a tank crashed into a car and tried to flee the scene. The driver of the car died on the spot, and there was no official information about the incident in official reports by the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

In 2020, an armoured personnel carrier BTR-80 collided with a UAZ-452 vehicle in North Ossetia. As a result of the accident, five people received injuries of varying severity and were hospitalised.

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OC MediaElizaveta Chukharova