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.
On Thursday, 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. He described the allegations of air defence fire as unfounded and “unethical.”
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 cited video footage from inside the plane that showed “punctured life vests”.
The allegation was echoed by four sources in Azerbaijan who spoke to Reuters. The four, all of whom had knowledge of the investigation, told the news agency that the flight was downed by a Russian air defence system.
There has also 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.
Separately, FlightRadar24 said online that the plane had faced “strong GPS jamming” that “made the aircraft transmit bad ADS-B data”, referring to the information that allows flight-tracking websites to follow planes in flight. Russia has been blamed in the past for jamming GPS transmissions in the wider region.
Russia has previously employed jamming technology to defend against drone attacks, and some reports suggest that Chechnya came under such an attack shortly before the crash.
On Wednesday morning, Khamzat Kadyrov, a local security official and nephew of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, wrote on Instagram that “all drones were successfully shot down”.
In recent weeks, Ukrainian drones have targeted several sites in Chechnya, including a facility housing local police forces.
The popular Russian pro-war blogger Yuri Podolyaka said holes seen in the wreckage of the plane were similar to the damage caused by “anti-aircraft missile system”, adding: “Everything points to that.”
The Azerbaijani president, Ilham Aliyev, said it was too soon to speculate on the reasons behind the crash, but that the weather had forced the plane to change from its planned course. Russia’s civil aviation authority said preliminary information showed the pilots diverted to Aktau after a bird strike led to an emergency on board.
Azerbaijan’s prosecutor general’s office has opened a criminal investigation.
The country’s state news agency, Azertac, said an official delegation of the emergency situations minister, the deputy general prosecutor and the vice-president of Azerbaijan Airlines were sent to Aktau to conduct an “on-site investigation”.
On Thursday, national flags were lowered across Azerbaijan, traffic across the country stopped at noon, and signals were sounded from ships and trains as the country observed a nationwide moment of silence for the victims of the plane crash.
Kazakhstan’s main transport prosecutor, Timur Suleimenov, told a briefing in the capital, Astana, that the plane’s black box, which contains flight data to help determine the cause of a crash, had been found, Interfax reported.
A spokesperson for the Kazakh emergencies ministry said on Thursday that specialists were working to identify the bodies of those who died in the crash. Of the survivors, 11 remained in intensive care, the spokesperson said. Russia’s emergencies ministry said on Thursday morning it had evacuated nine Russian nationals who survived the crash, including one child, from Aktau to Moscow on a special flight.
