Kyiv, Ukraine – Russian air defense officials could have shot down an Azerbaijani airliner in Chechnya after panicking during an attack on Ukraine, experts and experts from Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan have told Al Jazeera.
Moscow may have added what one expert called a “crime” by not allowing the damaged plane to land nearby and instead forcing it to fly to Kazakhstan.
The analysis of these experts comes in between high reports citing unnamed Azerbaijani officials and other experts pointing the finger at Russia for the accident, in which at least 38 people were killed.
The Kremlin said AZAL flight 8432 with 67 people on board hit a flock of birds early Wednesday after entering Russian airspace to reach Grozny, the capital of the Chechen administration.
But within hours, pictures and videos of the plane surfaced, apparently showing deep holes and several marks on its tail.
The damage is similar to that caused by a Pantsir-S1 strike, the Soviet-era air defense system Chechnya uses to counter Ukrainian missiles, experts say. At the time, the Chechen air force was protesting the drone attacks in Ukraine, saying that they had shot down “all of them”.
No bird can do such damage; it is absurd and a crime to say such things,” a Kazakh aviation security expert told Al Jazeera.
He insisted on anonymity because Kazakh authorities detained blogger Azamat Sarsenbayev for 10 days after taking photos and videos at the crash site.
“The arrest of the blogger shows that he was following instructions from the Kremlin,” Alisher Ilkhamov, head of Central Asia Due Diligence, a London-based think tank, told Al Jazeera.
Meanwhile, the plane was “vulnerable to GPS jamming and spoofing” that is frequently used in drone attacks, according to Flightradar24, an international aircraft tracking service.
Russian aviation authorities did not allow the plane to land at any of the many nearby airports, forcing the pilots to fly over the stormy Caspian Sea to try to land in the western Kazakh city of Aktau. The plane crashed near Aktau airport.
“They wanted to write it as a bird strike, but in the end a Kazakh blogger ruined their plans,” Ilkhamov said.
Kazakhstan has been one of Russia's closest allies in Central Asia for years, and President Qasym-Jomart Toqayev has asked the Russian military to help his government. put an end to popular unrest in 2022.
The Kremlin has so far refused to comment on the growing allegations that Russia may have been involved in the downing of the plane.
“I have nothing to add,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow on Friday. “We don't feel we have the right to give tests, we can't do it.” Moscow has warned against speculating about the cause of the crash, and urged investigators to be allowed to complete their investigation.
But if Russia's air defenses shot down the plane, the Kremlin and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov would “violate all international law,” said Ihor Romanenko, a former deputy chief of staff of Ukraine's armed forces who focused on the security of the country. airplane. decades.
“He committed a crime. They were scared, thinking that maybe it was the cause,” he said, referring to the neglect of Kadyrov's “psychosis” due to the recent Ukrainian terrorist attacks that hit and destroyed a military base in Grozny.
Regarding Russia's decision to refuse to allow planes to land in its territory, Romanenko said: “They wanted to drown these tired, depressed, and wounded people.”
Meanwhile, some Russian media have attributed the downing of the plane to Ukrainian drones, while Kremlin-backed television insists that birds and fog caused the crash.
“They are stuck. It was the drones that destroyed the plane, Andrey Pronin, who pioneered the use of drones in the Ukrainian military and directed the school of unmanned pilots in Kyiv, told Al Jazeera.
Baku has not officially announced the results of its investigation, but a list of Azerbaijani officials and experts have insisted that Russian air defenses were responsible for the crash.
In 2014, a Malaysian airliner crashed in separatist-controlled areas of southeastern Ukraine.
All 283 passengers and 15 crew members were killed, and a Dutch-led investigation determined two years later that a Russian Buk missile had shot down the plane. Several separatists told this reporter a few days after the attack that they shot down the plane thinking it was a Ukrainian warplane.
The downing of the Azerbaijani airliner “will not end” relations between Moscow and Baku, but it has already damaged Russia's image in the oil-rich Caspian region, a Baku expert said.
“Baku may not decide to sever relations with Moscow, but without a doubt this will undermine the relationship between the two countries,” Emil Mustafayev, editor-in-chief of Minval Politika magazine, told Al Jazeera.
“In addition, Russia is in danger of losing the remaining vestiges of authority among the people of Azerbaijan,” he said. “Even those who used to support Putin look down on Russia today for trying to hide the truth and avoid responsibility for the tragedy.”
Chechen leader Kadyrov is a former separatist strongman whose iron-fisted policies in the mountains, especially in the Muslim North Caucasus, often defy the Russian government.
The leader has been one of the biggest supporters of Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine and has claimed that Chechen forces are leading the war.
But Al Jazeera's analysis showed that theirs responsibility for the conflict it was less and mostly it was Russian horrors and police in the Moscow region.