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Sources within the government of Azerbaijan told Euronews on Thursday they believe a Russian surface-to-air missile caused the deadly crash of Azerbaijan Airlines Flight J2-8243, which killed over 30 of the plane’s passengers on Wednesday.

The Embraer-190 passenger jet was flying from Azerbaijan’s capital of Baku to Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, with 67 people aboard on Christmas Day when it veered hundreds of miles off-course and went down near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan. 

Russian officials suggested the plane attempted an emergency landing because of a bird strike, while Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev pointed to bad weather in the region. However, Ukrainian officials quickly blamed the crash on Russian missile fire, and some aviation experts backed Ukraine’s claims on Wednesday evening.

Aviation experts noted Flight J2-8243 passed through an area where heavy Russian anti-aircraft fire was directed at Ukrainian drones. Russian aviation officials claimed this course change was necessary due to heavy fog on the ground in Grozny, but analysts said this did not explain why the plane flew to the opposite side of the Caspian Sea before coming down in Kazakhstan.

“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 anti-aircraft fire,” said Matt Borie, chief intelligence officer for Osprey Flight Solutions, an aviation security firm. 

Andriy Kovalenko, head of counter-disinformation for Ukrainian military intelligence, said on Wednesday the plane was clearly brought down by Russian fire, but “admitting this is inconvenient for everyone, so efforts will be made to cover it up, even the holes in the remaining parts of the aircraft.”

Kovalenko was alluding to Azerbaijan’s efforts to forge a stronger relationship with Russia, even as Russia’s former regional ally – and Azerbaijan’s bitter rival – Armenia drifts away from Moscow. Armenia is furious because Russian “peacekeepers” stood idle while Muslim Azeri forces ruthlessly seized, and ethnically cleansed, Christian Armenians from the Nagorno-Karabakh region in September 2023.

Azerbaijan’s President Aliev was in Russia on Wednesday, but cut his visit short and returned home after the plane crash.

Kovalenko noted video footage from aboard Flight J2-8243 has been posted to social media by survivors of the crash, “showing punctured life vests and other damage” consistent with shrapnel tearing through the plane.

“During the flight, the fuselage was pierced, and the aircraft systems were damaged by the explosion of an air defense missile with shrapnel. Everything is well-documented and clearly captured,” he said.

https://twitter.com/AndriKovalenko/status/1872188200363622568

“Russia should have closed the airspace over Grozny but failed to do so. The plane was damaged by the Russians and was sent to Kazakhstan instead of being urgently landed in Grozny to save lives,” the Ukrainian intelligence officer charged.

A growing number of reporters and aviation experts noted on Wednesday that the fuselage of the plane showed damage that was inconsistent with a bird strike, and more closely resembled shrapnel punctures or bullet holes. 

“It looks very much like the detonation of an air defence missile to the rear and to the left of the aircraft, if you look at the pattern of shrapnel that we see,” analyst Justin Crump of risk advisory firm Sibylline told the BBC on Thursday.

Flightradar24, which tracks air traffic around the world in real time, said the changes in course and altitude by Flight J2-8243 before it crashed indicated the plane was “exposed to GPS jamming and spoofing near Grozny.”

The crash of an Azerbaijan Airlines plane in Kazakhstan has brought attention to passenger plane accidents worldwide this year. (Photo by Omar Zaghloul/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Azerbaijan Airlines, and the Azeri government, have yet to make an official statement that deviates from the “bird strike” story, but sources within the Azeri government told Euronews on Thursday that the plane was indeed damaged by a Russian missile – and the Russian government refused desperate requests from the pilots for an emergency landing, forcing the plane to fly across the Caspian Sea to Aktau, Kazakhstan.

An international media outlet called AnewZ based in Baku quoted Azeri officials who said the missile was launched by a Russian Pantsir-S air defense system while the plane was passing over Chechnya. Russian forces in the area were attempting to shoot down Ukrainian drones at the time, as confirmed by Chechen officials.

“If this preliminary data is confirmed, this would be the second time in a decade that Russian forces have destroyed a commercial aircraft after the MH17 crash in Ukraine. This time, Russia’s own citizens, as well as those from neighboring countries, are among the casualties,” Euronews noted. Sixteen of the passengers aboard Flight J2-8243 were reportedly Russian nationals.