‘Not long ago we lost our father. And now Ramazan’, says Pitima Filiyeva, whose brother, Ramazan, was among the passengers killed on Azerbaijan Airlines (AZAL) flight J2-8243.
On 25 December, the flight crashed en route from Baku to Grozny near the Kazakh city of Aktau, killing 38 of the 67 passengers and crew, including Ramazan.
The day after, Azerbaijani government sources confirmed to Euronews that its preliminary investigation had revealed the plane was shot down by a Russian air defence missile. Soon after, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev called on Russia to ‘admit guilt, bring the guilty parties to criminal responsibility, and pay compensation to the Azerbaijani state, the injured passengers, and crew members’.
Russia has consistently repeated the claim that the crash was caused by a ‘collision with a flock of birds’. During a press conference on 14 January, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reportedly said that the decoding of the black boxes has not confirmed ‘some preliminary conclusions stated in the media’, without specifying what those conclusions were specifically.
The majority of the passengers of AZAL flight J2-8243 were citizens of Azerbaijan, who were forced to fly in order to leave the country due to the ongoing land border closure.
Despite promises of compensation, victims and their families are still waiting for the funds to arrive, leaving many in a hard place following the loss of their main earner. Questions have also arisen over why people are forced to fly to Russia when they reside so close to the land border.
‘Nothing in the whole world is more valuable than the life of my brother’
Ramazan Filiyev, 26, lived with his family in the village of Sharif. He was the household’s sole breadwinner, and had been supporting the family since childhood.
‘He started working from the 9th grade. He was a very kind and hard worker’, his sister Pitima tells OC Media.
Like most of those killed, Ramazan was a resident of Azerbaijan’s Balakan district, in the far north of the country bordering Russia.
According to his sister, Ramazan had been married two years prior and was the father of a 10-month-old boy.
Though his family was based in Azerbaijan, he worked as a construction worker in the Chechen capital, Grozny.
‘In our village, many people go to work in Russia because of unemployment, and my brother also decided to go to work in Russia’, Pitima tells OC Media.
Following the crash, AZAL promised to pay ₼40,000 ($24,000) to the families of any passengers killed and ₼20,000 ($12,000) to surviving passengers. In addition, the company stated that all surviving passengers would be provided with appropriate insurance coverage as required by Azerbaijani legislation.
However, to receive the money, the company asked families for extensive documentation proving that they were financially reliant on the victim. Family members were also required to bring documentation confirming the funeral expenses of the deceased were paid by relatives.
Pitima tells OC Media that they have not yet received any compensation from AZAL, though they took all the required documentation to the company’s offices on 13 January.
‘Nothing in the whole world is more valuable than the life of my brother. He was the only boy in our family and lived with my mother. We don’t know how we can comfort our mother over our loss’ Pitima says.
Anar Babaev, 33, was another victim of the plane crash. Though he lived in Khasavyurt, Daghestan, his family comes from the southern Azerbaijani village of Shiyakaran.
According to his father, Zohrab Babaev, Anar had been financially supporting his family since the age of seven or eight.
‘He was my supporter and worked hard. His first job was to carry heavy things with a wheelbarrow. When he grew up, I took my family to Khasavyurt and we sold many things. After work, Anar worked at night as a taxi driver. He did everything to support his family’, Zohrab Babaev tells OC Media.
According to his father, Anar was married but was never able to legally register the marriage due to a lack of time.
After his father suffered a stroke, leaving him unable to work, Anar became the sole breadwinner. During this time, Anar’s brother was deported from Russia for violating immigration law, leaving his family, including his brother’s dependents, at a loss for income.
When AZAL called to tell the family how to receive payment following Anar’s death, the first thing they asked was about his son’s documents.
‘I said he did not have any documents, because all of them were burnt with him. Afterwards, someone called me and said that all his documentation would be ready in 48 hours. His documents were prepared and I took these documents to the AZAL office on 14 January’, Zohrab Babaev says.
While families are still awaiting payment, the Azerbaijani government has already planned to allocate AZAL a subsidy of ₼5.9 million ($3.5 million) from the state budget this year.
‘When the borders were open, we were very comfortable’
Both the Balakan and Zagatala districts are located near the border with Georgia. Historically, the residents of these districts, who are mostly Russian-speaking, have traveled through Georgia to Russia in order to engage in seasonal or permanent work. However, after Azerbaijan’s land border was closed in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, residents have been forced to fly from Baku in order to work abroad. Even as most of the world has since relaxed its COVID-related border closures, Azerbaijan has opted to keep its land border shuttered.
One such resident forced to fly to engage in seasonal work was 43-year-old Xizri Jeerov, who was a victim of the AZAL plane crash. He flew with his daughter, 16-year-old Salihat, who is currently still hospitalised with wounds sustained during the crash. Some of their other relatives from the village of Danachi, Asif Jaraev, 47, and Hajiibrahim Jaraev, 34, were also killed as a result of the accident.
‘Xizri is my close neighbor and I know the whole of his family. For us, it is also hard that he died in this plane crash,’ Danachi resident Sabir Ahmadov tells OC Media.
According to Ahmadov, many Danachi residents work in Russia, including Jeerov and his two brothers. Jeerov often worked with one of his brothers in Grozny and in the summer, with his other brother in Rostov Oblast. On 25 December, he was flying to Grozny to join his brother in construction work.
According to the Azerbaijani State Statistics Committee, 73,640 Azerbaijani citizens worked in Russia in 2023, an increase from 72,650 in 2022, and 71,720 in 2021. The statistics for 2024 have not yet been released.
Since the border closure, finding money to pay for the seasonal flights has been a struggle for local residents.
‘It was hard to cover the expenses, and if he couldn’t find the money for the plane he borrowed money. Afterwards, when he earned money in Grozny, he sent his money back,’ Pitima Filiyeva says about her deceased brother Ramazan.
‘When the borders were open, we were very comfortable. We paid ₽2,000 ($20) and a car was delivered to our address. But today, we have to pay ₽18,000–₽20,000 ($180–$200) and for us, this amount is very expensive. And we have to pay this amount twice when we want to return to Daghestan. Therefore, we tried not to come to Azerbaijan often, because for us it was very expensive’, Zohrab Babaev tells OC Media.
Following the plane crash, the topic of the land border closure was reopened on social media.
The day of the crash, social activist Giyas Ibrahim noted on Facebook that people usually went to places like Grozny by car, questioning why this was no longer possible.
Similarly, historian Altay Goyushov criticised the quarantine regime on Facebook, highlighting that it was irresponsible for planes to fly the Baku–Grozny route.
‘The skies above the cities of the North Caucasus, especially Grozny, are in a state of constant danger because of the ongoing war. That is, Ukrainian drones fly in and strike Grozny, and Russian air defense forces shoot down these drones. So there is an active battlefield there. Look how indifferent to human life one must be, how bad the safety regulations must be, to send a passenger plane to such a remote place’, Goyushov wrote on Facebook.
After Baku State University lecturer Sabina Izzatli insulted such critics on Facebook, stating that accidents happen not only in the air, Balakan resident Isa Taralov responded by highlighting that some of his relatives and neighbours had died in the crash when the distance from Balakan to Grozny was less than the distance from Balakan to Baku.
Izzatli deleted Taralov’s comment from underneath her post, but OC Media was able to see a screenshot of the comment before the deletion.
This is not the only time the death of Azerbaijani citizens has caused uproar regarding the ongoing border closure.
In February 2023, four Azerbaijani students — Shahin Valiyev, Humam Ismayilli, Samir Guliyev, and Gunduz Nazarzade — died in the earthquake which devastated both Turkey and Syria.
Usually, Azerbaijani students studying abroad take the time to travel home and spend time with family during the winter break in February. However, due to the land border closure, the only option to travel back to Azerbaijan was to fly, an option which was ‘outrageously expensive’ for most students.
After their deaths, the Azerbaijani government decided to open the land border from the Nakhchivan side, but only for the students’ families to retrieve their bodies.
Despite the second wave of criticism following the AZAL crash, on 27 December, the Azerbaijani government extended the land border closure until 1 April, which will mark over five years since the land borders were originally closed.