Last December 25, before the Azeri airlines flight J28243 will end up crashing to the ground, there were two moments that prolonged the disaster. First, the two pilots – now deceased – they lost control of the systems navigation and communication of the aircraft. Blinded, they continued flying with altered course until, secondly, artillery fire from the ground riddled with shrapnel its fuselage.
The hypothesis of a military action is confirmed by the details that have emerged so far from the preliminary investigation of an incident that has cost 38 civilian lives and for which the Russian leader Vladimir Putinhas apologized without admitting responsibility.
The investigation promoted by the government of Azerbaijan, in which Technicians from Embraer, the Brazilian manufacturer, participate of the plane, but the first Azeri suspicion, formulated two days after the disaster, now transcends official versions: the commercial plane, before being the target of a shot from the Russian anti-aircraft defense – possibly a Pantsir battery -, was affected by a wave of electromagnetic waves of a military jamming device.
The origin is a Russian system that has become one of the technological keys to the Ukrainian war. Its commercial name is Krasukhathe same one that in Russia is given to the toxic fruit of belladonna.
electronic interference
In rural Russia it is also called “demon berry”. The krasukha is a toxic plant, which produces hallucinations and confusion to those who consume it.
That was why the Russian military industrial corporation Rostec named its most advanced electronic warfare system with that word. The downed Azeri plane was one of the last targets of the antenna and transmitter group of a Krasukha-4, the most modern version of the system, probably located at that time in the surroundings of Grozny (Chehenia).
The president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, has confirmed that Baku handles these indications in an interview given on the 29th to his country’s public television, and which is transcribed on the presidency’s website. Other Azeri official sources have spoken of an impact prior to the fall of the plane, a “external kinetic and also electronic interference”according to a statement from AZAL, the airlines of Azerbaijan.
Two Krasukha electronic jamming systems, mounted on trucks. / Rostec
Ilham Aliyev has cited this circumstance twice, in an interview that served as his statement. “We know that “Our plane became uncontrollable through electronic warfare,” has assured. For the Azeri president, that was why the plane could not land in Grozny, and crossed hundreds of miles over the Caspian Sea before crashing around the city of acktauin Kazakhstan
Find, blind and attack
In an explanatory document made public in 2014, at the commercial launch of Krasukha-4, the firm Kret, a subsidiary of Rostec and manufacturer of the systemexplains that “the system affects enemy vehicles in the same way (as belladonna), making their radars go haywire through interference.”
When used to neutralize a bomber, the Krasukha-4 waves prevent the attacker from locating targets: “Until the Krasukha is activated, the pilot can see the surrounding situation and the targets to be destroyed, and can recognize them. When the system is activated, the pilot loses this whole situation and therefore cannot complete the mission,” explains the Rostec corporation document.
Sources from the Spanish Air Force corroborate this newspaper that This system is used by the Kremlin to protect command postslarge logistics warehouses and key factories for war. In fact, “it is one of the causes that keeps the air forces grounded in the war in Ukraine,” they consider.
Currently, Russia is using its electronic warfare system not against enemy fighters, but against large drones and NATO patent loitering munitions used by Ukraine.
On Christmas Day, the Russian army did not close the airspace over Grozny in time when it was already preparing to repel an alleged Ukrainian drone attack in the vicinity. Krasukha 4 was launched, the same system from which the Ukrainians captured a truck in the spring of 2022 near kyiv; the same as the Russians had tested the protection of facilities in different phases of the war in Syria.
Equipped with a power that allows it to blind targets flying up to 300 kilometers away, even designed to interfere with large American AWACS espionage and electronic warfare aircraft, the Krasukha was able to first detect the radar of the Azeri civilian plane and then follow its operators. the cadence of actions that Rostec explains in its brochure: “Once the objective is detected, it is recognized, priorities are established and then the decision is made on its deletion”. But on this occasion what Krasukha showed on its screens was not a Ukrainian drone, but an EMBR 190 plane on a commercial flight with 67 people on board.
