RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin apologised to his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev at the weekend for what he called a “tragic incident” following the crash of an Azerbaijani airliner in Kazakhstan that killed 38 people — but he stopped short of acknowledging that Moscow was responsible.

There are mounting allegations that the plane was shot down by Russian air defences attempting to deflect a Ukrainian drone strike near Grozny, the capital of the Russian republic of Chechnya.

A Kremlin statement said on Saturday that air defence systems were firing near Grozny airport as the airliner “repeatedly” attempted to land there on Wednesday. It did not explicitly say that one of them had hit the plane.