On Wednesday, October 9, Russian President Vladimir Putin met Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan.
Putin opened the conversation with what many in Azerbaijan had long demanded - an acknowledgment of Russia’s involvement in the crash of an Azerbaijani airliner last December.
He recalled apologizing that “the tragedy with the plane occurred in the skies over Russia,” and offered condolences to the families of the victims.
Putin said Russia’s investigation is nearing completion and that two factors can already be identified as causes of the disaster.
“The first is that a Ukrainian drone was in the sky. We were tracking three such drones that crossed the Russian border at night on the day of the tragedy,” Putin said.
The second factor, he said, was “technical failures in Russia’s own air defense system.”
“And the two missiles that were fired did not directly hit the plane — if that had happened, it would have gone down immediately - but exploded - perhaps it was self-destruction — several meters away, roughly 10 meters,” Putin said.
He added that the aircraft was not struck by lethal fragments but “most likely, by debris,” which is why a theory emerged about a collision with a flock of birds. He stressed that Russian air traffic controllers offered the crew a landing in Makhachkala, but “the crew decided to proceed to its base airport, and then to Kazakhstan.”
Putin arrived in Tajikistan on a state visit on October 8. The day before, Aliyev phoned to congratulate Putin on his birthday; their last call had been in March. In September, Putin and Aliyev had a brief encounter in China at the SCO summit.
An Embraer 190 operated by Azerbaijan Airlines en route from Baku to Grozny crashed on December 25, 2024, in Kazakhstan. There were 67 people on board; 38 were killed. A preliminary Azerbaijani investigation found the jet was hit by a Russian missile, reportedly fired by a Pantsir-S system.
Azerbaijani media later published explosive details about the Embraer 190 crash.
The damaged aircraft was denied permission to land at Russian airports despite pilots’ requests for an emergency landing. The jet flew over the Caspian Sea toward the Kazakh city of Aktau.
Immediately after the crash, Russian agencies suggested the accident might have been caused by a “bird strike.” Azerbaijan blamed Russia for the tragedy and demanded an apology, accountability, and compensation for the families of the dead and injured. Putin did apologize at the time, but only for the fact that the accident occurred in Russian airspace.
Later, Azerbaijan repeatedly demanded that Russia acknowledge responsibility for what happened in the skies over Grozny. The Kremlin urged all sides to wait for the investigation’s results.
In June, relations between Azerbaijan and Russia sharply deteriorated. The deaths of two Azerbaijanis in pretrial detention in Yekaterinburg sparked a diplomatic dispute.
In July, Baku lodged formal protests with Moscow over unlawful actions by Russian law enforcement, instances of ethnic intolerance in Russian media, distortions of reality and a disinformation campaign against Azerbaijan, as well as Russia’s refusal to conduct an adequate investigation into the Embraer 190 disaster.
