It looks increasingly likely that Russian air-defense systems shot down a commercial airliner en route from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Grozny, the capital of the semi-autonomous region of Chechnya in southern Russia, on Christmas Day.

The Azerbaijan Airlines jet had been flying in an area that was the scene of recent Ukrainian drone operations against targets in Russia. And according to Russian media, Russian air defenses had been active in responding to those Ukrainian incursions.

The New York Times’ Ivan Nechepurenko reports that “the plane crashed while trying to make an emergency landing in Aktau, Kazakhstan, about 260 miles east of Grozny, on the shore of the Caspian Sea. Of the 62 passengers and five crew members on board, 38 were killed, according to Kazakhstan’s authorities.”

While en route to Grozny, the flight was diverted because of fog, Russian state news agencies reported. Soon after the crash, Russia’s state aviation authority said that the plane had hit a flock of birds, causing it to attempt an emergency landing, the state-run RIA Novosti news agency reported.

But aviation experts and military observers expressed skepticism of that account, citing the recent military activity in the area near the flight path, the available information from aviation sources and videos and images posted by survivors.

The area around Grozny has been the scene of aerial battles in recent weeks involving drones, usually launched by Ukraine, and Russian air defenses. Osprey Flight Solutions, an aviation security company, said in a note to its clients on Wednesday that the Azerbaijan Airlines plane had likely been struck by Russian air defenses “during an incident of misidentification.”

It’s not surprising that the Russians would seek to deflect blame for the incident, despite the fact that the bird-strike hypothesis does not immediately appear to be very plausible. Videos circulating on the Web (unverified at this time) appear to show a heavily damaged fuselage that tracks more with the effects of a missile and its explosion than a bird strike.

Of course, it was just ten years ago that Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down over eastern Ukraine. All 298 passengers and crew were killed. After a lengthy investigation, Dutch officials determined that the airliner was downed by a Buk surface-to-air missile that originated from an area controlled by Russian-backed separatists and was probably fired by members of the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade of the Russian Army. But the Kremlin never acknowledged responsibility for the incident in any way; Vladimir Putin openly — and implausibly — insisted that responsibility rested with Ukraine.

Moreover, the Russian government’s lack of transparency in that incident is not dissimilar to how the Soviet government handled the shootdown of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 over the Sea of Japan in 1983. All 269 people on board the Boeing 747 — including U.S. Congressman Larry McDonald of Georgia — were killed. The Korean flight had indeed overflown restricted Soviet airspace by mistake, but even though the Soviet pilots that intercepted the airliner visually identified it as a Boeing, they still didn’t hesitate to blow it out of the sky. Afterwards, the Soviets initially denied any knowledge of what had happened, and they hid evidence from investigators. The facts did not fully come to light for a decade and only after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Notably, Israel’s El Al airline has announced that it is suspending flights to and from Moscow for at least a week in the aftermath of the downing of the Azerbaijani airliner due to “developments in Russia’s airspace.”

Here’s a Christmas pro tip: Avoid flying on any airliner anywhere near Russian air-defense systems and their twitchy trigger fingers.