By Anatoly Kurmanaev

BERLIN — President Vladimir Putin of Russia on Saturday (28) apologized for the crash of an Azerbaijan Airlines plane this past week, breaking the Kremlin’s three-day silence on the accident that killed 38 people. He did not explicitly acknowledge Russia’s responsibility for the crash.

Putin “offered his apologies” for the crash in a phone call to his Azerbaijani counterpart, Ilham Aliyev, the Kremlin said in a statement. Putin initiated the phone call, according to the statement, and told Aliyev “that the tragic incident took place in Russian airspace”.

Putin said that as the plane approached its scheduled destination of Grozny, in southern Russia, Russian air defences had begun to repulse an attack by Ukrainian drones on the Grozny airport and others nearby, according to the Kremlin.

Aviation experts and US officials believe a Russian air defence missile may have mistakenly downed the passenger jet. The Kremlin statement stopped short of attributing the crash to a Russian missile, but in its own statement acknowledging the apology, Azerbaijan’s presidential office suggested that was indeed the cause.

“President Ilham Aliyev emphasized that the Azerbaijan Airlines passenger plane encountered external physical and technical interference while in Russian airspace, resulting in a complete loss of control,” Azerbaijan’s presidential office said in a statement on Saturday. The plane “was able to make an emergency landing solely due to the courage and professionalism of the pilots,” the statement added.

Aliyev called for a thorough investigation and for “ensuring those responsible are held accountable.”

President Joe Biden, vacationing Saturday in the US Virgin Islands, responded to a question shouted by a reporter about whether Putin should take responsibility for the crash.

“Apparently he did, but I haven’t spoken to him,” Biden said, offering a more generous interpretation of the Kremlin’s statement.

The Embraer 190 airliner was travelling from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Grozny, but was diverted from its path. It eventually crashed in Aktau, Kazakhstan, after crossing the Caspian Sea. More than half of the people on board were Azerbaijani citizens. Seven Russians and six Kazakhs died in the crash.

Of the 67 people on board, 29 survived.

Putin said Russia had opened a criminal investigation into the crash, according to the Kremlin, and was hosting Azerbaijani investigators in Grozny. The Kremlin’s statement tried to project a united front among the three nations most affected by the crash.

“The relevant agencies of Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan are closely cooperating on the site of the catastrophe,” the Kremlin statement read.

On Wednesday (25), the day of the crash, Russian authorities initially said that the plane had been diverted because of fog and that birds had caused the crash. But survivors described a banging noise outside the plane and fragments entering the cabin, injuring an arm of a flight attendant.

Aliyev’s more accusatory, strongly worded statement on Saturday presents the first challenge from Russia’s allies to Moscow’s attempts to control the narrative.

Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan have long tried to build economic ties to the West and shed the Russian colonial legacy — without antagonizing the Kremlin. The two former Soviet states have taken a neutral stance on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, benefiting from growing trade with Russia without directly supporting the Kremlin’s war aims.

Still, the Kremlin’s apology without accepting responsibility complicates these countries’ efforts to maintain friendly relations with Russia without appearing weak to their citizens and the world, analysts said.

The Kremlin’s acceptance of responsibility is particularly important in Azerbaijan because Aliyev apologized to Putin for the Azerbaijani military’s erroneous downing of a Russian military helicopter in 2020. At the time, Azerbaijan swiftly took responsibility and offered compensation for the accident, which claimed the lives of two Russian servicemen.

Aliyev most likely expected a similar response now from the Kremlin, said Zaur Shiriyev, an Azerbaijan expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a policy research organization.

Putin’s statement “is a textbook example of a non-apology apology,” Shiriyev said in an email interview. “There was no direct acceptance of responsibility, no offer of compensation, and no commitment to hold those responsible accountable.”

Neither Kazakhstan nor Azerbaijan has the incentive to allow the plane crash to sink relations with an unpredictable and militaristic neighbour, foreign policy experts said. But the Kremlin’s tardy and partial apology could breed resentment in these countries, with long-term potential consequences for Russia’s influence in the former Soviet Union, the experts added.

“There aren’t that many countries that are on good terms with Russia now,” Rasim Musabayov, an Azerbaijani lawmaker, said in a phone interview Friday (27). “If Moscow doesn’t make the right steps in this situation, the list might get shorter.”

The government of Kazakhstan has been more cautious than Azerbaijan’s, with officials there refusing to assign blame thus far.

International law states that because the plane crashed on Kazakhstan’s territory, it will have to disclose the findings of the investigation. But the Kazakh government faces particular risks in provoking the Kremlin, said Luca Anceschi, a professor of Eurasian Studies at the University of Glasgow, in Scotland.

The landlocked Central Asian nation’s economy remains dependent on neighbouring Russia, which ships most of its energy exports. And the Kazakhstan government’s gradual efforts to assert national language and culture in public life have drawn periodic ire from Russian ultranationalists, who have called on the Kremlin to protect Russian speakers there. Putin has used similar claims to justify his invasion of Ukraine.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, Kazakhstan’s president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, has pursued a careful policy on neutrality, deepening economic ties to Russia and attending Putin’s summits, while delivering humanitarian aid to Ukraine and refusing to recognize Russian annexation of Ukrainian land.

Kazakhstan has also benefited from the West’s sanctions on Russia after the invasion. Its exports to Russia rose 25% in the first year of the war, as Russian companies sought alternative channels for buying foreign goods. Azerbaijan’s total trade with Russia rose 24% in the same period.

Tokayev will most likely try to prevent the plane crash from upsetting this delicate neutrality before expected Ukraine-Russia peace talks promised by President-elect Donald Trump, who takes office in January, Anceschi said. Kazakhstan’s main goal is to protect its interests in a new regional order that would emerge after the war, he said.

No Russian official has commented on the growing evidence that the plane was damaged by Russian air defences. On Friday, though, the head of the Russian civil aviation authority acknowledged that a Ukrainian drone attack had forced the Grozny airport to close on the morning of the crash.

Hours after the crash, Putin spoke to journalists at a summit in St. Petersburg, which was attended by Tokayev of Kazakhstan. Aliyev of Azerbaijan was supposed to be there but turned his plane around in mid-air after learning of the crash. Putin fielded nearly a dozen innocuous questions from carefully vetted reporters without mention of the crash.

Russian state television has largely ignored the crash in news bulletins and analytical shows. Although Russian state news agencies initially focused on the bird theory and the fog, they have stopped reporting on the topic as evidence of missile damage has grown.

Instead, pro-government journalists and social media channels Friday distributed a propaganda video clip showing Russian air defences shooting down Santa Claus’ flying sledge. “We don’t need anything foreign in our skies,” an actor playing the Russian version of Santa Claus tells an air-defence serviceman in the video.

To Alexander Baunov, a Russian political expert at Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre in Berlin, Russia’s long initial silence weakened Putin’s attempts to present himself as a champion of developing countries against American hegemony.

“We are seeing in real time a test of the so-called multipolar world about which Moscow talks so much,” he wrote on the Telegram messaging app Friday. Russia’s allies will note that Putin’s policy means in practice “the right of big and powerful nations to act with impunity and arrogance against the less big and more dependent ones,” he added.

-New York Times