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It was a tense conversation between two authoritarian leaders used to getting their way.
Russian President Vladimir V. Putin offered an explanation for the crash of the Azerbaijan Airlines plane that killed 38 people 38 days earlier. Maybe a bunch of birds, said Mr. Putin, or an exploding gas canister. Maybe a Ukrainian drone.
But President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan wasn’t buying it, according to two people familiar with that late December phone call. It became clear within hours of the crash that the plane had been shot down by Russian air defenses, which appeared to be a fatal mistake. It left debris lodged in a passenger’s leg and the car was riddled with holes.
On December 29, Mr. Aliyev went public with his anger without naming the Russian president. “The attempt to deny the obvious facts is both senseless and unreasonable,” he said.
The people who described the phone call to discuss sensitive diplomatic relations spoke on condition of anonymity. The Kremlin did not respond to a request for comment.
The furor over the plane crash — and Mr. Aliyev’s willingness to challenge Mr. Putin in public — signaled a dramatic rift between the two post-Soviet leaders who have been close for more than two decades. the government. Mr. Putin tried to appeal to Mr. Aliyev in an apparent effort to hush up the cause of the crash; Mr. Aliyev, emboldened by Russia’s waning influence in its former colonies, insisted that Russia publicly admit its mistakes.
Interviews last week with Azerbaijani officials and people close to the government indicated that the crash of the Embraer 190 on December 25, with 67 people. Instead of letting Mr Putin dictate his response to the crisis, Mr Aliyev repeatedly blasted Russia for its inaction. responsibility.
Rasim Musabekov, a member of the Azerbaijani Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, described Russia’s response to the crash as an “irrational attitude”.
“Azerbaijan will not accept such a chauvinist attitude,” he added.
Behind the scenes, the interview showed, those tensions flared directly between Mr. Aliyev and Mr. Putin, even as the two autocrats found common ground. In calls on Dec. 28 and again the next day, people familiar with the calls said Mr. Putin urged Mr. Aliyev to agree to an investigation into the crash. Mr. Aliyev refused, insisting that the plane’s black box be read in Brazil, where the plane was built, in a dramatic show of distrust of the Russian leadership.
Officials in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, spoke to The New York Times with the three survivors, who said it was clear to some passengers that they were under attack immediately after. At least two explosions rocked the plane in mid-air.
After the second explosion, a girl started screaming. Leyla Omarova, 28, looked down the corridor from her window seat and saw the girl’s clothes covered in blood.
Three rows behind them, Nurullah Sirajov, 71, was trying to comfort his wife. The first bomb must be the launch vehicle, he told her. They had never flown before.
Then came the second explosion, a gust of wind from the back of the plane and shouts, he said, from other passengers: “They hit us.”
As the plane bobbed up and down, coming to within 100 meters of the Caspian Sea, Mr. Sirajov thought that at least his wife’s marital dispute over who would die first would finally be resolved. the end: They will die together. But when the front part of the plane was destroyed in the collision, the tail section broke off, flipped over and plunged hundreds of meters to the sandy ground.
“Is anyone alive?” Mr. Sirajov remembers screaming into the sudden silence as he dangled from his belt.
As Europe closed its airspace to Russia after Mr Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, many Russians flying west now connect in Azerbaijan, an oil- and gas-rich former Soviet republic with 10 million people between Russia and Russia. and Iran. Russia also sees Azerbaijan as a key link on a route extending south to Iran, India and the Persian Gulf.
Its role as a transit point for sanctioned Russia is one way Azerbaijan has seen its influence increase vis-à-vis its neighbor to the far north. Mr. Aliyev has also used the Russian military’s provocation in Ukraine to push Russian peacekeepers out of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian-held region that Azerbaijan will regain by 2023.
Mr. Aliyev has strengthened his country’s cooperation with Turkey and armed Azerbaijan with advanced weapons purchased from Israel. He has cracked down heavily on activists and independent journalists, but has maintained ties with Europe, which sees Azerbaijan as an alternative to Russian oil and gas.
Baku-based political analyst Farhad Mammadov said Russia’s political and economic “pressure” on Azerbaijan has reduced to “absolutely nothing”. Aykhan Hajizada, a spokesman for Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was forthright in saying that his country was taking advantage of Russia: “They don’t want to lose Azerbaijan either,” he said.
The plane crash scandal emerged as an experiment. A senior US diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly, described the crash as a “proof of concept” for Azerbaijan’s ability to hold on to itself. Other post-Soviet countries that have sought a longer relationship with Russia, such as Kazakhstan, are watching closely.
“If this is how you behave in this incident with Azerbaijan, what will Uzbeks, Kazakhs and other partners of Russia think of you?” asked Mr. Musabekov, deputy. “Russia, as a country, is a very toxic partner that you need to ease the relationship with.”
Mr. Aliyev, who studied in Moscow and took over as Azerbaijan’s leader from his father in 2003, learned of the crash on his way to a summit of post-Soviet leaders in St. . Petersburg. He called Mr Putin from the plane to tell him he would not be coming.
Hours later, Azerbaijani officials landed in Aktau, Kazakhstan, the airport where the Embraer 190 attempted to make an emergency landing. the theory of a bird strike or an exploding oxygen gun that he heard from Russia.
“When I saw the plane, it was full of holes,” said Rinat Huseynov, director of security at Azerbaijan Airlines, in an interview. “We didn’t think it was possible.”
Mr Aliyev and Mr Putin spoke twice in the days following the crash. Mr Putin apologized for the “terrible incident” in Russian airspace but refused to accept that Russia had shot down the plane. The day after the apology, on December 29, Mr. Aliyev went public to accuse Russia of a cover-up.
“Unfortunately, for the first three days, we have heard nothing from Russia except baseless theories,” Mr. Aliyev said.
Officials said they hoped to have the results of the investigation before the end of January. Mr Aliyev insisted last week that Russia needed to accept responsibility and pay compensation, while the Kremlin said it was cooperating with the investigation.
“We are interested in a truly objective and impartial investigation,” Dmitri S. Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, told reporters last week.
The Azerbaijani working theory is that debris from a missile exploding from a Russian Pantsir air defense system destroyed the plane. A four-inch large metal fragment was found at the crash site.
Flight data and cockpit voice recordings, officials say, could help explain why the pilots chose to cross the Caspian Sea to land in Kazakhstan instead of closer airport in Russia; Mr Huseynov, the airline’s safety director, said the decision made sense given the cloudy conditions in southern Russia at the time.
Inside the passenger cabin, the flight attendants tried to calm the panic. Ms. Omarova, who was visiting her family in Russia, said she was unconscious. Mr Sirajov, who was collecting donations for his grandson in Grozny, said all he could think about was comforting his wife.
Flight data shows that after crossing the Caspian Sea, more than an hour after the pilots reported what they thought was a bird strike, the plane crashed on its second attempt to land at the airport. Aktau airport. All of the survivors were seated in about a third of the plane, according to people close to the investigation.
After the tailgating stopped, Mr. Sirajov fumbled in the dark to unbuckle his seat belt, unable to tell what had happened to his wife. Only later did he find out that he was still alive.
Finally, Mr. Sirajov pulled his belt and fell through the ceiling of the cabin. “Come here, come here,” he heard as someone pushed him toward a small light.
