President Leonid Kuchma yesterday sacked his acting defence minister in response to Saturday's air show crash in which 83 people were killed and more than 100 injured.
The prosecutor general detained the country's ex-air force commander and three other top military officials, in further evidence of Mr Kuchma's determination to punish those responsible. The prosecutor general's office said "serious errors" in preparing for the air show had contributed to the deaths.
Mr Evhem Marchuk, secretary of Ukraine's defence and security council and head of the state commission into the accident, said investigators were analysing the flight recorder retrieved from the twin-engined fighter, which fell from the sky on Saturday after failing to complete a difficult aerobatics manoeuvre.
He said it was getting increasingly hard to identify the bodies, many ripped apart by metal shards from the plane which were flung across the Sknyliv military airfield, on the outskirts of this picturesque city.
"Some of the bodies are so damaged that the final death toll could change by one body either way, but no more than that," Mr Marchuk said.
President Putin of Russia and the Pope sent their condolences to the victims' families in Lviv, a city considered by most of Ukraine's six million Catholics to be a symbol of their church's survival during communist persecution.
Late on Saturday, Mr Kuchma vowed to punish those responsible for the crash. He sacked Ukraine's air force chief and launched an investigation by top officials.
Yesterday he fired the head of armed forces' general staff, Gen Petro Shulyak, because he was standing in for the defence minister at the time of the crash, local television reported.
Defence Minister Mr Volodymyr Shkidchenko was reported by UNIAN news agency as offering his resignation to President Kuchma. Mr Kuchma's press spokeswoman and a defence ministry official said they could not confirm either report.
The prosecutor general's office said Ukraine's former air force commander, Gen Volodymyr Strelnykov, had been detained along with three other senior officials because there had been "serious errors" in preparing for display flights in Lviv.
Gen Strelnykov was sacked as air force commander on Saturday.
At the crash site, military men were stopping people from getting near the scene. Bodies that had been strewn across the tarmac were taken to morgues.
A huge refrigerator stood outside one nearby morgue and officials dressed in white overalls searched through the victims' remains to try to identify them.
"This is a terrible tragedy. A bitter lesson for the future, for the military but not only for the military," Mr Marchuk said.
"There are two main versions of events. The first version is negligence on the part of senior management in the air force.The second version is that the plane failed". He said the two experienced pilots, who ejected seconds before the plane began to somersault, had been interviewed from their hospital beds.
Local media blamed the tragedy on engine failure and witnesses said the engine went quiet before the jet plunged to the ground. But analysts have said spectators should not have been allowed to sit or stand in the plane's flight path.
President Kuchma said it was too early to apportion blame.
"It's like a bad dream," said a visibly shaken Mr Kuchma, who had cut short his holiday to rush to the scene late on Saturday.
A national day of mourning was announced for today.
The Lviv crash was the world's worst air show disaster. In 1988, 70 people were killed when three Italian jets collided, sending one into a crowd at Ramstein, Germany. - (Reuters)