Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Vladimir Putin meet at the Central Asia-Russia summit, in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, 9 October 2025. Photo: EPA / GRIGORY SYSOEV / SPUTNIK / KREMLIN POOL

While attending the Russia-Central Asia summit in Tajikistan’s capital Dushanbe on Thursday, Vladimir Putin for the first time admitted Russian responsibility for the downing of an Azerbaijani plane that crashed in the Kazakh city of Aktau in December, Russian news agency TASS has reported.

Meeting with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev on the sidelines of the summit, Putin said that the crash had been partially caused by Russian air defences attempting to down a Ukrainian drone. Two Russian missiles fired at the drone did not hit the AZAL aircraft directly, Putin told Aliyev, but exploded within metres of it, with the missile wreckage hitting the plane.

Though the crew had been given the option of making an emergency landing in the city of Makhachkala in the Russian republic of Dagestan in the North Caucasus, they chose to fly on, Putin said, adding that he had only learned the full details of the crash on Tuesday.

While Putin apologised for the “tragic incident”, which killed 38 of the 67 people on board, days after it happened, he initially refused to admit that Russian air defence systems had been responsible for it.

In a preliminary report into the crash published by Kazakhstan’s Transport Ministry in February, experts confirmed that the aircraft had been damaged by “external objects”.

In July, Azerbaijani media outlet Minval published a leaked note it said had been written by Russian military captain Dmitry Paladichuk, in which he took responsibility for transmitting the final order to shoot down the flight.

Following his meeting with Putin, Aliyev described his country’s relations with Russia as having developed “successfully” this year, according to Russian tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets.

Just three months ago, bilateral relations between Moscow and Baku reached a nadir following the death of two Azerbaijani citizens during coordinated Russian police raids in the city of Yekaterinburg in which over 50 people were arrested in late June.