Russia and Azerbaijan said on Wednesday that they have reached “an appropriate settlement” that includes compensation payments in the case of an Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed in Kazakhstan after being damaged by a Russian military strike on Dec. 25, 2024.
The agreement reflected efforts by the two countries to resolve a long-running dispute over the crash, which killed 38 of the 67 people on board. The Embraer 190 airliner crashed near the Kazakh city of Aktau after it was struck while trying to land in Grozny, Chechnya, and then diverted across the Caspian Sea.
“The steps undertaken confirm the mutual intention to build further mutually beneficial cooperation,” the foreign ministries of Russia and Azerbaijan said in a joint statement.
The statement said the settlement was based on an accord reached in October 2025, when Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged in a meeting with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev that Russian missile fire had damaged the plane. Putin indicated that the strike was accidental as it occurred while the Russian military was dealing with a Ukrainian drone attack. His comments went some way toward easing Azerbaijan’s anger over what it viewed as Russian attempts to avoid responsibility for the disaster.
The two sides “agreed to appropriately resolve the issues arising from the accident,” which occurred “as a result of the involuntary operation of the air defense system in the airspace of the Russian Federation,” the joint statement said. It expressed condolences to relatives and friends of those who died.
The two foreign ministries did not release details of the compensation payments. Kazakhstan is still leading an investigation of the crash.
