By Independent News Roundup
The UK’s Daily Express claimed in late November that Azerbaijan is secretly shipping Su-22 fighter-bomber jets to Ukraine via a convoluted route through Turkiye, Sudan, and Germany. This is the same route through which an obscure Rwandan online news outlet claimed in late September that Azerbaijan was secretly arming Ukraine with small arms and drones. That report went viral at the time after it was picked up by Russian media outlets like Sputnik amidst the then-ongoing Russian-Azerbaijani tensions.
Those same tensions soon abated after Putin met his counterpart Ilham Aliyev for talks in Dushanbe on the sidelines of the CIS leaders’ summit, after which the aforementioned report was rarely mentioned again by many of those who hitherto helped raise maximum awareness of it. The essence thereof was always suspicious due to the additional costs and shipping times connected with such a convoluted route as opposed to employing more direct land or rail ones via Turkiye, Bulgaria, and Romania.
Nevertheless, the Russian milblog Rybar – which also functions as a think tank of sorts – lent credence to that report in one of their Telegram posts at the time, but then they interestingly challenged the latest claim about Su-22s allegedly being shipped via this route. According to them, the Su-22s are very old, Ukraine doesn’t even need them (not even for spare parts), and the Daily Express is a sensationalist publication whose country benefits from creating new tensions in others’ ties with Russia.
To be sure, Russian-Azerbaijani ties still aren’t good despite their incipient rapprochement, with Russia’s unconventional threat perception of Azerbaijan remaining high due to its role in facilitating the Turkish-led injection of Western influence along Russia’s entire southern periphery. This is being advanced through the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” (TRIPP), which will facilitate NATO’s military-logistics to Central Asia and then the possible conforming of their armed forces to its standards.
Azerbaijan’s already achieved this by early November according to Aliyev, and with Azerbaijan having just joined the Central Asian Republics’ annual Consultative Meeting of Heads of State that was then rebranded as the “Community of Central Asia”, it might help those like Kazakhstan follow its lead. Simply put, Azerbaijan does indeed pose a latent unconventional threat to Russia’s strategic interests in Central Asia, but this doesn’t automatically mean that every report about its anti-Russian policies is true.
Accordingly, it’s questionable whether Azerbaijan is secretly shipping Su-22s to Ukraine, especially via the convoluted tri-continental route that a British tabloid claimed is being used for this. In fact, absent any evidence, this report might very well be a British intelligence operation aimed at exacerbating Russian-Azerbaijani mistrust for the purpose of provoking an “overreaction” from Russia that catalyzes a self-sustaining cycle of mutual escalations. Observers should therefore be very skeptical.
At the end of the day, reports from suspicious sources such as this one from a British tabloid and even the earlier one from that obscure Rwandan online news outlet might seem believable at first since they align with some readers’ expectations, but that’s all the more reason to second-guess their claims. Proper media literacy can help folks more confidently discern the variety of information products that they’re exposed to and therefore reduce the chances that they’re duped into falling for fake news.
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