AZERBAIJAN AIRLINES CRASH: RUSSIA PLAYS DOWN SPECULATION

Agencies

Kazakhstan: Russia and Kazakhstan have sought to temper speculation about the cause of the Azerbaijan Airlines plane crash, with the Kremlin urging people to wait for the results of an investigation. A Ukrainian national security official has claimed that the crash, which killed 38 people on Christmas Day, was caused by Russian air defence fire. The plane, which was flying from the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, to the Russian city of Grozny in Chechnya, came down in a field near Aktau in Kazakhstan after veering hundreds of miles off its planned route.

Twenty-nine people survived. Video of the crash appeared to show the plane plummeting out of the sky and bursting into flames as it hit the ground and thick, black plumes of smoke rising. The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said the investigation into the cause of the crash was under way, adding that it would be wrong to speculate before the inquiry concluded. The chair of Kazakhstan’s senate also stressed on Thursday that the cause remained unknown. “None of these countries – neither Azerbaijan, Russia nor Kazakhstan – is interested in hiding information. All information will be made available to the public,” said Ashimbayev Maulen.

Their comments came after Andriy Kovalenko, the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council’s Center for Countering Disinformation, posted on X on Wednesday: “This morning, an Embraer 190 aircraft of an Azerbaijani airline, flying from Baku to Grozny, was shot down by a Russian air defence system.’ He citied video footage from inside the plane that showed “punctured life vests”. Meanwhile, there has been speculation in Russian media that the plane could have been shot down by Russia’s air defences, which mistook it for a Ukrainian drone.

The Fighterbomber Telegram channel, which is believed to be run by Ilya Tumanov, a captain in the Russian army, released a clip that appeared to show holes in the plane’s wreckage, which some suggested resembled the kind of damage caused by shelling or an explosion with shrapnel. Fighterbomber said it was unlikely that the holes were caused by a bird strike.

The Kazakh aviation expert Serik Mukhtybayev told the Orda news outlet that a bird strike causing the plane crash was “nearly impossible” given the altitude at which the aircraft was flying when it encountered trouble. He pointed to external impact as a probable cause. Flight-tracking data from Flightradar24.com showed the aircraft making what appeared to be a figure of eight while nearing the airport in Aktau, the plane’s altitude moving up and down substantially over the last minutes of the flight before hitting the ground.