I guess there's an interesting discussion on russian forum:
I don't have a good knowledge of Russin, however excerpts were on Polish forum, and I can happily translate.
If you take the picture at the top, there's a vertical situation (ground level, units are meters) describing distances and positions. At 0.0 you have runway threshold. AT 0.6km there's a road, mentioned in some simulations and screens. At 1.1 km you can see the NDB location.
If you now look back into the CASA case, the pilots looked for visual, or at least ground visual contact, and they just descended below clouds. If we assume similar might have happened here, here's a possible chain:
NOTICE: This is speculation ONLY.
1. The crew decides to go for approach
2. They're descending as planned until 2-3kms from the runway, and some 200m above. Slowly they're descending looking around, searching for clearing in the clouds.
3. They suddenly have an opening in the clouds, and oops - they find themselves quite high (notice terrain drop at 1.5km). They start to descend below proper descend line, and reduce speed.
4. Suddenly, the hill begins. The terrain goes up, the pilots try to get back into the air higher, losing speed probably. They do not manage to do it properly, and they end up on NDB antenna, 1.1 km from the runway, then they still climb until the fall about 600m later. Lack of speed? Could be, depending on thrust, we might know on official.
Some questions remain of course. If they had QFE set, would they go below 0? Never know, they might've been happy to see the ground and decided to go on visuals, it was seconds after all. Perhaps a QFE/QNH match (as described above)?
And why would they go "on top of the trees" once they catched visual with ground, instead of trying to stay as close to the clouds?
This is all speculation, however I am more and more convinced of this (or similar) scenario, involving descend to visual and then a hill climb (from 200 to over 250 meters within 1.5 km). Anyways, CFIT is very plausible considering that plot on Russian forum.
Adam
PS Idea behind has been published on Polish forum, I'm just retranslating to give you all this info.