Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev meets with Vladimir Putin in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, 9 October 2025. Photo: EPA / Grigory Sysoev / Sputnik / Kremlin
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev accused the Russian military of deliberately targeting the country’s embassy in Kyiv in a series of apparently random airstrikes on the Ukrainian capital over the past few months.
Aliyev, who made the statement after meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Germany on Saturday, called the attacks, which took place in August and November, an “unfriendly step”.
“There have been three strikes on our embassy in Ukraine. After the first, we thought it could be an accident. Then we passed the coordinates of our diplomatic missions to the Russian side,” Aliyev said in his statement. “Despite that, two more strikes followed. These were targeted attacks on the diplomatic missions of Azerbaijan.”
The Russian Foreign Ministry responded to the comments by saying that Moscow was “puzzled” by the accusations, Russian news agency TASS reported on Saturday evening, adding that “when planning strikes, painstaking consideration of a target’s location is taken into account to avoid civilian casualties, and the locations of diplomatic missions are taken into account.”
Relations between Baku and Moscow have deteriorated significantly in the past two years, not least since an Azerbaijani passenger jet crashed near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan after being hit by a Russian missile in December 2024, killing 38 people.
In an attempt to repair ties with the oil-rich Caspian Sea nation, Vladimir Putin made an uncharacteristic admission of Russian responsibility for the tragedy while meeting with Aliyev at the Russia-Central Asia summit in Tajikistan in October, saying that the crash had been partially caused by Russian air defences attempting to down a Ukrainian drone.
