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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.
An Azerbaijan Airlines flight was en route from Azerbaijan's capital Baku to Grozny in Chechnya, southern Russia, when it overturned and crashed in Kazakhstan, killing 38 people. Twenty-nine passengers survived.
Most of those on the plane, an Embraer 190, were citizens of Azerbaijan. There were 16 Russians on board as well as several citizens of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
In official statements on Wednesday, Russia said heavy fog forced the plane to divert on its way to Grozny and seek to land in Kazakhstan, where it crashed after hitting a flock of birds.
On the same day, the president of Azerbaijan said he was told that the flight had been diverted due to bad weather.
But that was disputed by 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 the Ukrainian strike. They also cited images of what appeared to be shrapnel damage to the interior and tail of the damaged plane.
Andriy Kovalenko, an official of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, wrote in Telegram: “Russia should have closed the airspace over Grozny, but it didn't do it . . . The plane was damaged by the Russians and sent to Kazakhstan, instead of arriving quickly in Grozny and saving people's lives.”
Senior Ukrainian officials confirmed to the Financial Times that Kyiv believes the plane was hit by Russian air defense systems.
Osprey, the aviation security agency, said: “Following the video of the accident and the conditions around the airspace in southwestern Russia indicate that it is possible that the plane was hit by some kind of anti-aircraft fire.”
A senior official in the Caucasus region said evidence points to the plane being damaged by air defenses in the Grozny area.
“If (Russian authorities) were going to (use) jamming systems and anti-aircraft systems, they should have closed (the airspace),” the official told the FT. “The best explanation (for why they don't) is incompetence.”
Illustration by Steven Bernard