Kyiv, Ukraine – Russian air defense officials may have hit an Azerbaijani passenger plane over Chechnya after panicking during a Ukrainian drone strike, according to analysts and experts from Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.
Moscow may also have made what one expert called a “crime” worse by not allowing the damaged plane to land nearby and instead forcing it to fly to Kazakhstan.
The analysis of these experts lies in between increasing reports He quoted unnamed Azerbaijani officials and other analysts as pointing the finger at Russia for the crash that killed at least 38 people.
The Kremlin claimed flight AZAL 8432, with 67 passengers on board, struck a flock of birds early Wednesday after entering Russian airspace to land in Grozny, Chechnya’s administrative capital.
But within hours, photos and videos of the plane emerged that appeared to show deep holes and multiple pockmarks on the tail.
The damage is similar to that caused by an attack by Pantsir-S1, a Soviet-era defense system that Chechnya uses to repel Ukrainian drone attacks, experts say. At that time, Chechen air defense forces repelled an attack by Ukrainian drones and claimed to have shot down “all of them.”
“No bird can ever do such damage; It is absurd and criminal to claim such a thing,” a Kazakh aviation safety expert told Al Jazeera.
He insisted on anonymity because Kazakh authorities detained blogger Azamat Sarsenbayev for 10 days after he took photos and videos at the crash site.
“The fact that they detained the blogger shows that they followed an order from the Kremlin,” Alisher Ilkhamov, head of Central Asia Due Diligence, a London-based think tank, told Al Jazeera.
Meanwhile, the plane was “subject to GPS jamming and spoofing,” which is routinely used against drone attacks, according to Flightradar24, an international flight tracking service.
Russian aviation authorities did not allow the plane to land at any of the numerous airports nearby, forcing the pilots to fly over the stormy Caspian Sea to try to land in the western Kazakh town of Aktau. The plane crashed near Aktau airport.
“They wanted to write it off as a bird strike, but in the end the Kazakh blogger ruined their plans,” Ilkhamov said.
Kazakhstan has been one of Russia’s closest allies in Central Asia for decades, and its President Qasym-Jomart Toqayev invited Russian forces to help his government put down a popular uprising in 2022.
The Kremlin has so far refused to comment on mounting 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 do not feel entitled to make assessments and will not do so.” Moscow has warned against speculation about the causes of the plane crash and urged that investigators be allowed to complete their investigation first.
But if Russian air defenses did bring down the plane, the Kremlin and Chechnya’s leader Ramzan Kadyrov would have broken “every international rule they could,” said Ihor Romanenko, a former deputy chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, who specializes in air defense concentrated decades.
“You have committed a crime. They got scared and thought maybe it was a provocation,” he said, attributing the negligence to Kadyrov’s “psychosis” over recent Ukrainian drone strikes that hit and damaged military sites in Grozny.
Regarding Russia’s decision not to allow the plane to land on its territory, Romanenko said: “They wanted to drown these tired, stressed and wounded people.”
Meanwhile, some Russian media outlets claimed it was Ukrainian drones that damaged the plane, while Kremlin-run TV channels insisted birds and fog caused the crash.
“They rave. It was shrapnel that damaged the plane,” Andrey Pronin, a pioneer in the use of drones in the Ukrainian military and head of a school for pilots of unmanned aircraft in Kiev, told Al Jazeera.
Baku has not officially announced the results of its investigation, but a number of Azerbaijani officials and experts insisted that Russian air defenses caused the crash.
In 2014, a Malaysian passenger plane crashed over separatist-held areas in southeastern Ukraine.
All 283 passengers and 15 crew died, and a Dutch-led investigation two years later concluded that a Russian Buk missile had shot down the plane. Several separatists told this reporter days after the attack that they shot down the plane, mistaking it for a Ukrainian military plane.
The Azerbaijani plane crash will not “sever” relations between Moscow and Baku, but it has already damaged Russia’s image in the oil-rich Caspian country, a Baku-based analyst said.
“Baku is unlikely to decide to cut ties with Moscow, but the incident will undoubtedly have a negative impact on bilateral relations,” Emil Mustafayev, editor-in-chief of Minvalpolitika magazine, told Al Jazeera.
“Moreover, Russia risks losing the last vestiges of its public authority in Azerbaijan,” he said. “Even those who once supported Putin now view Russia with contempt for trying to hide the truth and evade responsibility for the tragedy.”
Chechen ruler Kadyrov is a former strong-arm separatist whose iron-fisted policies in the mountainous, predominantly Muslim North Caucasus province often flout Russian federal laws.
The leader has been one of the most vocal supporters of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, claiming that Chechen soldiers were at the forefront of the war.
But Al Jazeera’s analysis showed that theirs role in the conflict was minimal and mostly consisted of frightening ethnic Russian soldiers and monitoring the territories occupied by Moscow.
