KIEV, February 2. /TASS/. Iran has offered to pay a sum of 80,000 US dollars to each family of Ukrainian nationals who died in the Ukraine International Airlines passenger jet crash near Teheran but Kiev thinks this sum is not enough, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky said on Sunday.

"As for the Ukrainian side, they offered a sum of 80,000 US dollars to the families of each crash victim but we did not accept it. I think it is not enough," he told the 1+1 television channel. "A human life cannot be measured in monetary denomination but we will press for bigger compensation."

He once again said that Kiev demanded the plane’s flight recorders be given to the Ukrainian side for decoding. According to Zelensky, the Iranian side suggested Ukrainian specialists be commissioned to Iran for these purposes. However he said the Iranian side might refuse to hand over the flight recorders after decoding them. "No, we want to have them [the flight recorders] back in Ukraine," he said, adding that Ukrainian specialists should have a possibility to take the flight recorders to Ukraine in case they were not completely decoded in Iran. The Iranian authorities said such an option was possible, he recalled.

On January 8, a Boeing-737 of the Ukrainian International Airlines bound for Kiev crashed minutes after takeoff at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Airport. The crash killed all 176 people on board - citizens of Afghanistan, Germany, Iran, Canada and Ukraine and also British and Swedish subjects.

On January 11, Iran’s Armed Forces General Staff released a statement admitting the plane had been mistakenly shot down. According to Iranian Brigadier-General Amir-Ali Hajizadeh, the plane was misidentified as a cruise missile by the air defense force.