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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 plane was on its way from the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, to Grozny in Chechnya, southern Russia, when it changed course and made an emergency landing in Kazakhstan, killing 38 people. Twenty-nine passengers survived.
Most of those on board the Embraer 190 plane were Azerbaijani citizens. Also on board were 16 Russians and several citizens of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
Russia said in preliminary official reports on Wednesday that dense fog forced the plane to divert from its scheduled landing in Grozny and seek to land in Kazakhstan, where it crashed after colliding with a flock of birds.
On the same day, the Azerbaijani President said that he was informed that the plane had changed its course due to bad weather conditions.
But that contradicted experts and officials in the region and in Ukraine, who cited evidence that Russian air defenses were operating over Grozny at the time in response to a Ukrainian drone airstrike. They also cited photos of what appear to be shrapnel in the interior and tail of the crashed plane.
Andriy Kovalenko, a Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council official, 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 people’s lives.”
Senior Ukrainian officials confirmed to the Financial Times that Kiev likely believes the plane was hit by Russian air defense systems.
“The following video of the wreckage and conditions surrounding the airspace security environment in southwest Russia indicate that the aircraft may have been exposed to some form of anti-aircraft fire,” Osprey Aviation Security said.
A senior official in the Caucasus region said that evidence indicates that the plane was damaged by air defenses over the Grozny region.
“If (the Russian authorities) were going to use jamming and anti-aircraft systems, they should have closed (the airspace),” the official told the Financial Times. “The most moderate explanation (for why they didn't do it) is incompetence.”
Cartography by Stephen Bernard
