Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Monday that an Iranian delegation will visit Ukraine on Wednesday and Thursday to discuss compensation for a Ukrainian jet shot down by Iran mistakenly in early January.

Kuleba said Ukraine would represent all countries and groups affected during the talks, Reuters reported.

“I cannot disclose final numbers of the compensation ... numbers will be the result of the consultations,” he said.

The Ukrainian airliner was shot down shortly after taking off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini airport on January 8, killing all 167 passengers and 9 crew members.

On January 11, the Armed Forces General Staff released a statement saying the Ukrainian passenger plane was mistakenly downed near the airport. 

The incident happened a few hours after Iran fired dozens of ballistic missiles at a U.S. airbase inside Iraq in retaliation for the assassination of top Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani.

The airplane had been mistaken for an invading missile.

Iran has sent the black box of the passenger plane to France for decoding.

The Iranian embassy in France announced on July 21 that the preliminary analysis of the recovered data from the black boxes is underway in the BEA laboratory in France.

According to the embassy, a team of Civil Aviation Organization of the Islamic Republic of Iran in a joint effort with the French side began to decode the black boxes the prior day, Mehr reported.

On the first day of this joint technical cooperation, a delegation of Iranian experts and a group of French laboratory experts succeeded in recovering the FDR (flight data recording) section in the black boxes of the plane, it added.

NA/PA