On 28 December 2024 Russian President Vladimir Putin came as close as he was ever likely to in admitting that Russian air defences had mistakenly shot down Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 three days before.
A statement from the Kremlin noted that, in speaking to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, Putin “apologised for the fact that the tragic incident occurred in the Russian airspace”.
Flight 8243 was an Embraer 190AR that was on a scheduled flight from Heydar Aliyev International Airport in Baku to Kadyrov Grozny International Airport near Grozny in Russia on 25 December. While on approach to Grozny it was severely damaged by what are now understood to have been Russian surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) before diverting towards Aktau International Airport in Kazakhstan and crashing before it could land there. Of the 62 passengers and five crew on board, 38 died in the crash, including both pilots and a flight attendant, while 29 people survived.
Russian authorities initially claimed Flight 8243 had suffered a bird strike, as the crew had initially reported at the time, but numerous survivors recalled multiple explosions, while imagery of the aircraft wreckage clearly revealed fragmentation damage consistent with a SAM attack.
The Kremlin subsequently conceded that Russian air defences were repelling Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicle attacks at the time. These actions would have been combined with GPS jamming, exacerbating an air picture already confused by fog (having lost the use of aircraft’s navigational aids, the crew twice tried to land at Grozny but were thwarted by fog in the minutes before the aircraft was struck).
Azerbaijani government sources told news outlets on 26 December that a Russian Pantsir-S1 self-propelled air defence system was responsible for downing Flight 8243.
