Did Russian air defence down the Azerbaijani plane in Kazakhstan?

Kyiv, Ukraine – Russian air defence officials could very possibly have struck an Azerbaijani passenger jet over Chechnya after panicking during a Ukrainian drone attack, analysts and experts from Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan have told Al Jazeera.

Moscow might have also compounded what one expert described as a “crime” by not letting the damaged plane land nearby and instead forcing it to fly to Kazakhstan.

The analysis by these experts comes amid mounting reports quoting unnamed Azerbaijani officials and other analysts pointing fingers at Russia for the crash, in which at least 38 people were killed.

The Kremlin claimed that the AZAL 8432 flight with 67 passengers on board hit a flock of birds early Wednesday after it entered Russian airspace to land in Grozny, Chechnya’s administrative capital.

But within hours, photos and videos of the plane surfaced, apparently showing deep holes and multiple pockmarks on its tail.

The damage is similar to that caused by a strike by Pantsir-S1, a Soviet-era defence system Chechnya uses to repel Ukrainian drone attacks, say experts. At the time, Chechen air defence forces were repelling an attack by Ukrainian drones, claiming to have shot down “all of them”.

“No bird can ever cause such damage; it’s absurd and criminal to claim such a thing,” a Kazakh aviation safety expert told Al Jazeera.

He insisted on anonymity because Kazakh authorities arrested blogger Azamat Sarsenbayev for 10 days after he took photos and videos at the crash site.

“The fact that they jailed the blogger shows that they were following an instruction from the Kremlin,” Alisher Ilkhamov, head of Central Asia Due Diligence, a London-based think tank, told Al Jazeera.

Meanwhile, the plane was “exposed to GPS jamming and spoofing” that are routinely used against drone attacks, according to Flightradar24, an international flight tracking service.

Russian aviation authorities did not allow the plane to land in any of the multiple airports nearby, forcing the pilots to fly over the stormy Caspian Sea to try to land in the western Kazakh city of Aktau. The plane crashed close to Aktau airport.

“They wanted to write it off as a bird strike, but in the end the Kazakh blogger ruined their plans,” Ilkhamov said.

Kazakhstan has for decades been one of Russia’s closest allies in Central Asia, and its President Qasym-Jomart Toqayev invited Russian forces to help his government quell a popular uprising in 2022.

The Kremlin has so far refused to comment on the mounting accusations that Russia might have been involved in the downing of the plane.

“I’ve got nothing to add,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists in Moscow on Friday. “We don’t feel entitled to give assessments, won’t do it.” Moscow has cautioned against speculation into the causes of the plane crash, urging that investigators be allowed to complete their probes first.

But if Russian air defence did bring the plane down, the Kremlin and Chechnya’s leader Ramzan Kadyrov “broke each and every international rule they could”, according to Ihor Romanenko, former deputy head of Ukraine’s general staff of armed forces who focused on air defence for decades.

“They committed a crime. They got scared, thinking maybe it was a provocation,” he said, ascribing the negligence to Kadyrov’s “psychosis” over recent Ukrainian drone attacks that hit and damaged military sites in Grozny.

As for the Russian decision to not allow the plane to land within its territory, Romanenko said: “They wanted to drown these tired, stressed, wounded people.”

Meanwhile, some Russian media outlets claimed it was Ukrainian drones that damaged the plane, while Kremlin-run television channels insisted that birds and fog caused the crash.

“They’re raving. It was shrapnel that damaged” the plane, Andrey Pronin, who pioneered the use of drones in the Ukrainian military and heads a school for the pilots of unmanned aircraft in Kyiv, told Al Jazeera.

Baku has not officially announced the results of its investigation, but a string of Azerbaijani officials and experts have insisted that Russian air defence caused the crash.

In 2014, a Malaysian passenger plane crashed over separatist-controlled areas in southeastern Ukraine.

All 283 passengers and 15 crew members were killed, and a Dutch-led investigation concluded two years later that a Russian Buk missile shot the plane down. Several separatists told this reporter days after the attack that they had shot the plane down mistaking it for a Ukrainian military aircraft.

The Azerbaijani plane crash will not “sever” ties between Moscow and Baku, but it has already damaged Russia’s image in the oil-rich Caspian nation, a Baku-based analyst said.

“Baku will hardly opt to sever ties with Moscow, but the incident will undoubtedly have a negative impact on bilateral ties,” Emil Mustafayev, chief editor of the Minval Politika magazine, told Al Jazeera.

“Moreover, Russia risks losing the last remnants of its authority among the public in Azerbaijan,” he said. “Even those who used to support Putin view Russia with disdain today because of its attempts to hide the truth and avoid responsibility for the tragedy.”

Chechen ruler Kadyrov is a former separatist strongman whose iron-fisted policies in the mountainous, mostly-Muslim Northern Caucasus province often snub Russian federal laws.

The leader has been one of the most vocal supporters of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and claimed that Chechen servicemen spearhead the war.

But Al Jazeera’s analysis showed that their role in the conflict was minimal and mostly consisted of frightening ethnic Russian servicemen and policing Moscow-occupied areas.