The captain of the aircraft, 49-year-old Ivan Ivanovich Korogodin (referred to as "Vanya" on the CVR recording), had 12,312 hours of flying experience, 5,956 of which were as a pilot of a Tu-154.

Almost immediately, the stall warning sounded and then the flight's angle of attack increased to 46 degrees while its forward airspeed dropped to zero.

Inside the cockpit, as the time passed, stress increased, and eventually the crew was very distressed by the situation, especially in the final moment before the crash.

At 15:38:29, the flight crashed 45 kilometres (28 mi; 24 nmi) north-west of Donetsk,[3] near the village of Sukha Balka,[2] killing all 170 people on board.

On Wednesday, Ukrainian emergency service personnel concluded their search for bodies, confirming that all 170 people on board had perished.

[6] Because of the extensive crash forces and post-accident fires, rescuers believed that it would be very difficult to identify the majority of the victims at the site.

The search for the black boxes, which was interrupted for the night, concluded the following morning, when both recorders were found and subsequently transported to Moscow for analysis.

The Interstate Aviation Committee (IAC or Russian: MAK), after initial decoding of the flight recorder data, issued flight safety recommendations advising to avoid entering thunderstorms, to follow all maximum height limitations based on aircraft load and outside air temperature and to improve pilot training when working in these situations.

While avoiding areas of thunderstorms and turbulence, the crew allowed the aircraft to enter pitch oscillations exceeding the angle of attack operational range.

Lack of control over speed and not following the Flight Manual to prevent and recover from a stall and poor crew resource management allowed the situation to escalate into a catastrophic one.

[8][needs update] The Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations published a list of passengers travelling on Flight 612.

[citation needed] Five passengers had multiple citizenship in addition to Russian (one from the Netherlands, two from Germany, one from France and one from Finland).