Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev said on Sunday that Russia had inadvertently shot down the Azerbaijani airliner that crashed last week, and criticized Moscow for trying to “suppress” the issue for several days.
“We can say with complete clarity that the plane was shot down by Russia. […] We are not saying it was done intentionally, but it was done,” he told Azerbaijani state television.
Aliyev said the plane that crashed Wednesday in Kazakhstan came under fire from the ground over Russia and “went out of control due to electronic warfare.” Aliyev accused Russia of trying to “suppress” the issue for several days and said he was “disturbed and surprised” by the versions of events put forward by Russian officials.
“Unfortunately, in the first three days we heard nothing from Russia except misleading versions,” he said.
38 of the 67 people on board the plane died in the accident. The Kremlin said air defense systems were firing near Grozny, the regional capital of the Russian republic of Chechnya, where the plane had attempted to land to intercept a Ukrainian drone attack.
Aliyev said Azerbaijan made three demands from Russia regarding the accident.
He said, “First of all, the Russian side should apologize to Azerbaijan. Second, it should admit its guilt. Third, the culprits should be punished, bringing them to criminal responsibility and the Azerbaijani state, the injured passengers and crew members should be compensated.”
Aliyev said the first demand had “already been met” when Russian President Vladimir Putin apologized to him on Saturday. Putin called the accident a “tragic incident”, although he did not accept Moscow’s responsibility.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian state media on Sunday that Putin had spoken to Aliyev again by phone, but did not provide details of the conversation.
The Kremlin also said a joint investigation by Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan had begun at the crash site near the Kazakh city of Aktau. The plane was flying from Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, to Grozny when it turned toward Kazakhstan in the Caspian Sea, hundreds of kilometers (miles) from its intended destination, and crashed while attempting to land.
Passengers and crew who survived the crash told Azerbaijani media that they heard loud noises in the plane as it circled over Grozny.
Dmitry Yadrov, the head of Rosaviatsiya, Russia’s civil aviation authority, said on Friday that as the plane was preparing to land in Grozny in deep fog, Ukrainian drones were targeting the city, prompting authorities to close the area to air traffic. Fell.
The crash is the second fatal civil aviation accident related to fighting in Ukraine. Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down by a Russian surface-to-air missile, killing all 298 people on board, as it was flying over territory in eastern Ukraine controlled by Moscow-backed separatists in 2014.
Russia has denied responsibility, but in 2022 a Dutch court convicted two Russians and a pro-Russian Ukrainian man for their role in downing a plane with an air defense system flown from a Russian military base to Ukraine.