Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev did not hesitate on Sunday to accuse Russia of trying to hide its responsibility for the crash of the state-owned Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed on 25 December in western Kazakhstan, killing 38 people, while demanding an official apology from the Kremlin for the downing of the aircraft.
In a rare gesture yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin offered his apology to Aliyev for the ‘tragic accident’ on Christmas Day, though without acknowledging Moscow’s responsibility for the tragic fate of the Azerbaijan Airlines flight from Baku to Grozny, which was severely damaged when it was hit by anti-aircraft defences as it was about to land in the Russian Caucasus city, coinciding with a drone attack by Ukraine.
In statements reported by several media, however, Aliyev made it clear that while ‘our plane was shot down by accident’ when it entered Russian airspace, Russia’s responsibility is clear and the Russian authorities should acknowledge the facts. ‘Unfortunately, for the first three days we only heard absurd versions from Russia,’ the Azeri president said, referring to the theories put forward by Moscow immediately after the tragedy, attributing the incident to the explosion of a gas cylinder inside the plane, or even saying that the plane suffered a bird strike, the latter theory being described as “absurd and criminal” by air safety experts.
‘We have seen clear attempts to cover up what happened,’ insisted Aliyev, who demanded that Russia accept its guilt and punish those responsible for the fatal plane crash. So far, however, Putin’s rare apology yesterday is the closest Moscow has come to accepting that it was its forces that caused the downing of the plane, and only after several sources close to the investigation have leaked to the press in recent days that all indications point to Russian air defences mistakenly targeting flight J2-8243.
Russia has so far limited itself to announcing the opening of an investigation into the downing of the Azerbaijan’s state airline plane. It should not be forgotten, however, that just a few months ago it was 10 years since Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down by Russian air defence while flying over eastern Ukraine, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew members on board.
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Pablo Gómez is a specialist in Turkey and has been editor-in-chief of Hispanatolia since 2011. He has been analysing current affairs and geopolitics in Turkey and the surrounding region since 2006.
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