I wonder how much of this is connected to Russia’s total disengagement from Nagorno-Karabakh last year? Like did Russia lash out at Azerbaijan for humiliating it over being unable to back Armenia up?
Maybe… but it’s probably just incompetence.
Quote from Aliyev: "Firstly, Russia must apologise to Azerbaijan. Secondly, it must admit its guilt. Thirdly, the perpetrators must be punished and brought to criminal responsibility, and compensation must be paid to the Azerbaijani state, the affected passengers, and crew members. These are our conditions.
While I agree with most of that, I don’t agree with part of his third point. It is, perhaps, reasonable to ask for an investigation. But it is entirely possible that there is no individual involved on the SAM crew who acted improperly, certainly not to a level of criminal responsibility. There could have been an equipment failure, for example. It could be that someone designing doctrine made a mistake. It could be that an order was misunderstood. Tragedies do happen without a bad actor at their root.
Russia has at least some incentive to punish people who are culpable if they acted poorly insofar as they are causing problems for Russia, I think. Russia very much wants to have countries providing flight services into Russia, especially now, with Russia under sanctions and having limited aircraft and freedom of the skies access. That’s a disincentive that didn’t exist with, say, MH17, where the airspace involved was Ukrainian, and where Russia probably didn’t care whether or not airlines were scared out of Ukrainian airspace.
I think that a better ask from Azerbaijan – one which was not on their list of demands – would be changes to Russian military and civilian ATC policy to ensure that if Azerbaijan continues to fly aircraft in Russian airspace, that Azerbaijani aircraft are not at risk of such incidents. Maybe they need to route aircraft differently, close some airports, restrict how aircraft fly, or have a way of reliably sending instructions to all planes in an airspace to act in a clearly non-threatening way if SAM crews need to come to a higher alert status.
What Azerbaijan is going to want is their planes not being shot down. Criminal penalties can, in some cases, be a way to achieve that, but they aren’t the only way to do so, and won’t be appropriate in some cases.
the perpetration is not by a single person, but distributed and the world (as in the general populus, whom these leaders appeal to) need to acknowledge this.
examples:
-
the person that shot the missile, not knowing that it was a civilian plane
-
the commander that told them to shoot at anything they see on the radar
-
the engineer that gave up their morals to work for the MIC and develop the AA system
-
the news writer that wrote fearmongering propaganda saying that the war was needed
-
putin, who started the war
-
