Azerbaijan enacted a national day of mourning on Thursday following a plane crash that killed 38 passengers and left 29 survivors. The Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer 190 flight left Baku, Azerbaijan, on Wednesday and was slated to land in Grozny,

The extremely rare publicised apology from Putin was the closest Moscow had come to accepting some blame for Wednesday's disaster, although the Kremlin statement did not say Russia had shot down the plane.