When a passenger plane with 67 people on board slammed to the ground on Kazakhstan’s Caspian Sea coast early on December 25, Russian authorities and state media were quick to name possible causes: heavy fog, a bird strike, and -- after footage showing pre-crash damage to the jet emerged -- the explosion of an oxygen tank in the cabin.
But mounting evidence suggests the Azerbaijan Airlines plane, which was headed from Baku to Grozny, the capital of Russia’s Chechnya region, may have been hit by an air-defense missile defending against an alleged Ukrainian drone attack on Chechnya before crossing the Caspian and crashing near Aqtau, Kazakhstan, killing 38 passengers and crew.
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The evidence, much of which has not been corroborated by authorities in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, or Russia, includes footage from inside the plane before the crash, images of the planes hole-pocked tail section after the crash, a survivor’s comments, and accounts indicating that there was a suspected drone attack around the time the plane apparently tried to land in Grozny.
If a surface-to-air strike is confirmed as the cause, it would be the second time a Russian missile has shot down a passenger jet since Moscow’s war on Ukraine started with the occupation of Crimea and the conflict in the Donbas a decade ago. A Russian Buk missile that was brought into territory held by Moscow-backed forces in the Donetsk region downed Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 passengers and crew. After that crash, Russia unleashed a hail of false claims and outlandish theories about the cause.
'Exposed To GPS Jamming'
The Embraer 190 left Baku before dawn with 62 passengers and five crew. The short flight northwest to Grozny was apparently uneventful for half an hour, at which point the aircraft “encountered significant GPS interference,” according to Flightradar24, a site that tracks air traffic worldwide.
It said that from then until about 20 minutes before the crash, Flightradar24 at times received no data at all from the plane and at other times received data in which details about its position were absent or inaccurate.
“The aircraft was exposed to GPS jamming and spoofing near Grozny,” Flightradar24 said. While these measures themselves are unlikely to have caused the crash, they are signs that efforts to defend against a drone attack may have been under way on the ground.
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Reports of a drone attack on Grozny around the time the aircraft was in the area were posted by both a Chechen opposition Telegram channel and Baza, a Russian outlet with ties to the security services. Baza also said the Grozny airport stopped accepting incoming flights due to the alleged attack.
Open-source researchers confirmed a drone strike on Chechnya through geolocation.
A post on an Instagram account run by Chechen Security Council Secretary Khamzat Kadyrov, a nephew of the autocratic regional leader Ramzan Kadyrov, said that a drone attack was successfully repelled and included a brief clip of what the account suggested was a drone being hit and bursting into flames. The post was subsequently taken down.
State-run news outlet Grozny-Inform, apparently referring to the same Instagram post, also reported that Khamzat Kadyrov wrote “all [drones] have been shot down.”
'Something Exploded'
According to a purported transcript of a radio exchange between the cockpit crew and a Grozny dispatcher that was published on December 25 by VChK-OGPU, a telegram channel that posts on the war in Ukraine and has been designated a “foreign agent” by the Russian state, the crew reported that they had lost control of the plane due to a “bird strike.”
The VChK-OGPU report and the authenticity of the transcript could not be verified. The channel itself cast doubt on the notion of a bird strike, saying in a December 26 post that the damage visible in images of the remnants of the jet after its crash “indicates that a missile launched by an air-defense system probably exploded next to the plane.”
A surviving passenger told state-run Russian channel RT that they made three attempts to land in Grozny and that on the third approach “something exploded…. I wouldn’t say it was inside the plane” and that a piece of shrapnel flew between his legs and punctured a life jacket.
The pilots pulled the plane away from Grozny, with the purported transcript indicating that they asked the control tower about the weather in Mineralniye Vody and Makhachkala, two cities relatively close by. But the plane eventually crossed eastward over the Caspian and crashed near Aqtau at 11:28 a.m. local time, about an hour after the first reports that a drone attack on Grozny had been repelled.
A video of the jet descending and then hitting the ground indicates that it was intact and not on fire until it crashed. Post-crash images and footage of the tail section of the plane show numerous holes, tears, and dents that observers say look like damage from shrapnel. The edges of the holes are bent inwards, indicating an explosion outside the plane, not inside the cabin.
Military analyst Yan Matveyev told Current Time that the explosion of a Russian Pantsir S-1 missile at some distance from the fuselage could have caused the damage.
In addition, footage from inside the plane before the crash shows substantial damage.
According to The Wall Street Journal, British-headquartered aviation-security firm Osprey Flight Solutions said in an alert to airlines that the flight “was likely shot down by a Russian military air-defense system.”
“Video of the wreckage and the circumstances around the airspace security environment in southwest Russia indicates the possibility the aircraft was hit by some form of antiaircraft fire,” the Journal quoted Osprey’s chief intelligence officer, Matt Borie, as saying.
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The plane “was shot down by a Russian air defense system,” Andriy Kovalenko, head of the Center for Countering Disinformation at Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, wrote in a post on X on December 25. He did not cite evidence beyond the existing footage, media reports, and open-source information.
Ukraine has carried out numerous drone attacks on military targets in Russia since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion in February 2022. Drone attacks on Chechnya and other parts of the North Caucasus have increased in recent months.
Kazakh, Russian, and Azerbaijani authorities have said they won’t comment on the cause of the crash until an investigation is complete, and Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, urged others not to air “hypotheses.” In Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov has not commented beyond expressing condolences.