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Russian anti-aircraft fire may have caused a plane to crash in Kazakhstan on Christmas Day, according to defense experts and officials in the region.
The Azerbaijan Airlines flight was en route from Azerbaijan’s capital Baku to Grozny in Chechnya in southern Russia when it diverted and crashed in Kazakhstan, killing 38 people. Twenty-nine passengers survived.
Most of the passengers on the plane, an Embraer 190, were Azerbaijani citizens. There were also 16 Russians and several citizens of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan on board.
In preliminary official reports released Wednesday, Russia said heavy fog forced the plane to divert from its planned landing in Grozny and seek to land in Kazakhstan, where it crashed after hitting a volley of birds.
The same day, Azerbaijan’s president said he had been told the plane had been diverted due to bad weather conditions.
But that was contradicted by experts and officials in the region and Ukraine, who cited evidence that Russian air defenses were operating over Grozny at the time in response to a Ukrainian drone strike. They also cited images of what appears to be shrapnel damage to the interior and tail of the destroyed plane.
Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, posted on Telegram: “Russia was supposed to close the airspace over Grozny, but it did not do so. . . The plane was damaged by the Russians and sent to Kazakhstan, instead of making an emergency landing in Grozny and saving lives.”
Senior Ukrainian officials confirmed to the Financial Times that kyiv believed the plane was most likely hit by Russian air defense systems.
Osprey, an aviation safety agency, said: “Tracking video of the wreckage and the circumstances surrounding the airspace security environment in southwest Russia indicates the possibility that the aircraft may have was hit by some form of anti-aircraft fire. »
A senior official in the Caucasus region said evidence indicated the plane was damaged by air defenses over the Grozny region.
“If [Russian authorities are] go to [use] jamming systems and anti-aircraft systems, they should have closed [the airspace]”, the official told the FT. “The most benign explanation [for why they did not do so] This is incompetence.
Cartography by Steven Bernard
