The crash was the deadliest aviation accident in 2006. At the time it was the deadliest crash in Ukrainian modern history and the second deadliest in Ukraine SSR, after the 1979 Dniprodzerzhynsk mid-air collision. The death toll was eventually surpassed in 2014 when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down east of where Flight 612 had crashed, also located in Donetsk Oblast, killing all 298 people on board in the deadliest single airliner shoot-down in aviation history.