The Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed in Kazakhstan on Wednesday (25) was shot down by a Russian air defense system, revealed Reuters, which cites four sources in Azerbaijan with knowledge of the investigation.
The Embraer passenger plane crashed near the city of Aktau, in Kazakhstan, causing at least 38 deaths.
The incident occurred after the aircraft deviated from an area in Russia where air defense systems were used against Ukrainian drone attacks.
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The plane, a Brazilian-made Embraer 190, was flying between Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, and Grozny, in the Russian region of Chechnya. A few hours after the flight began, the Azerbaijan Airlines aircraft requested an emergency landing.
Due to intense fog in Grozny, the plane was diverted first to Makhachkala, in Russian Dagestan, and then to Aktau, where it ended up crashing about three kilometers from the Caspian city’s airport.
Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency said the plane “collided with birds”. Ukraine, however, today accused Russia of having shot down the plane with an air defense missile.
Even this Wednesday, there was already speculation that it was possible, as anticipated by R7 columnist Luiz Fara Monteiro.
“The explosion of an air defense missile damaged the plane and disabled its systems,” said the head of the Center for Combating Disinformation at the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Andri Kovalenko.
According to Kovalenko, the holes in the plane’s fuselage that can be seen in passenger photographs could not have been caused by birds.
“Russia should have closed the airspace over Grozny, but they didn’t,” said Kovalenko, referring to the risks created by the drone attack. The Russian city was attacked by ‘drones’ on Wednesday morning, confirmed the secretary of the Chechen Security Council and nephew of the head of the region, Khamzat Kadirov.
“Everything that was flying was shot down,” he said on social media on Wednesday, according to Spanish agency EFE.
“The plane was damaged by the Russians and sent to Kazakhstan instead of making an emergency landing in Grozny and saving lives,” Kovalenko accused.
Reacting to the possibility that the plane had been attacked, the spokesman for the Russian presidency (Kremlin), Dmitri Peskov, asked today not to draw hasty conclusions about the causes of the accident.
Azerbaijan Airlines announced the suspension of all flights to Grozny and Makhachkala until the causes of the tragedy are clarified.
Brazilian experts from Embraer are expected to arrive in Kazakhstan on Friday to participate in the investigation into the air disaster.
Russia has been at war with Ukraine since February 2022, when Moscow troops invaded the neighboring country to “demilitarize and denazify” it.
