Vladimir Putin breaks his wall of silence (and denial), takes the blame for passenger plane crash, but for a price

Russian President Vladimir Putin has finally (after nearly a year of silence, denial, and speculation) told Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev that Moscow will officially compensate Azerbaijan for its part in the accidental downing of an Azerbaijani passenger jet last December. This admission is honestly huge, especially since the event has strained relations between the two former Soviet republics for months now, making this a genuine attempt to turn the page.

The commitment was made during the two leaders’ first face-to-face meeting in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, a full ten months after the tragic crash. The whole incident revolves around an Azerbaijani Airlines flight that was heading from the capital, Baku, to the Chechen capital, Grozny, on Christmas Day, December 25, 2024. The jet, an Embraer 190, was carrying 67 people (62 passengers and five crew members) when it was mistakenly hit by Russian air defence fire. This is awful for everyone involved, especially the families, as 38 people were killed in the crash, per Aljazeera.

The pilots, after being struck, attempted an emergency landing in western Kazakhstan but crashed near Aktau. To make matters worse, Baku authorities had also accused Moscow of denying the distressed aircraft permission to land in Russian territory, effectively forcing the failed landing attempt in Kazakhstan. That’s a serious accusation, and to be fair, it’s the kind of thing that makes you seriously question who your allies are, especially with Russia doing this kind of thing so much.

Russia did, in fact, shoot down a civilian passenger plane

For months, the official response from Moscow was just a general apology for the “tragic incident,” but Putin had consistently stopped short of explicitly taking direct responsibility. Meanwhile, Aliyev had been calling out Moscow for trying to “hush up” the incident, and you can understand why. Imagine a core ally shooting down your civilian plane, even accidentally, and then trying to deflect. The relationship between the two nations had completely “roiled” over the controversy.

This time around, Putin was much more explicit in his acknowledgment. He finally laid out the specifics of what went wrong, which, frankly, is the kind of objective assessment the world has been waiting for. He explained that Russian air defense missiles were launched to target Ukrainian drones that had entered Russian airspace near the area.

Here’s the kicker, though: the missiles didn’t directly hit the passenger plane. Instead, he said the missiles detonated “several metres from the plane” after being launched to target the Ukrainian threats. The initial damage to the Embraer 190 was likely caused by shrapnel and debris from the exploding anti-air missiles, rather than a direct warhead strike. Putin even hinted that the pilot, seeing the damage, initially perceived it as a simple “collision with a flock of birds,” which shows you just how confusing the situation was in the cockpit.

While the admission points the finger at a “technical malfunction” within the air defense system, the key takeaway for Baku is that Russia is finally accepting culpability. And that brings us to the core promise of the meeting: compensation. Putin was crystal clear about the Russian government’s duty to follow through.

He pledged to ensure an “objective assessment” of the incident and promised to hold those responsible accountable, which is a massive step forward. He told Aliyev directly, “Of course, everything that is required in such tragic cases will be done by the Russian side on compensation and a legal assessment of all official things will be given.” But the line that really cuts through the noise and sums up the shift in Moscow’s stance is this: “It is our duty, I repeat once again … to give an objective assessment of everything that happened and to identify the true causes.”