Data available on Flight Radar24, a website tracking international flights, shows that the plane belonging to the Azerbaijani Silk Way airline returned to Baku on Wednesday from the Israeli Air Force’s Ovda base. As always, the carrier did not reveal what it transported to Azerbaijan.
Ovda is the only airfield through which explosives can be flown into and out of Israel. It is believed to be a key conduit for Israeli exports of weapons and ammunition to Azerbaijan. They have totaled billion of dollars in the last two decades, making the Jewish state one of Azerbaijan’s main arms suppliers.
Those supplies continued even during the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijani forces heavily used Israeli-made attack drones and multiple-launch rocket systems throughout the six-week hostilities. Visiting Israel in March 2023, Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov thanked the Israeli government for that support.
The Israeli daily Haaretz reported last year that Azerbaijani cargo planes landed at the Ovda air base for at least 92 times from 2016-2023. According to the paper, the frequency of such flights spiked in the run-up to Azerbaijan’s September 2023 military offensive that restored its full control over Karabakh.
The Ovda-Baku flights continued even after the outbreak of the ongoing conflict in Gaza last October which led Israel to seek and receive large-scale military aid from the United States. The Armenian investigative publication Hetq.am counted about a dozen such flights between November 2023 and April 2024.
Azerbaijan’s military spending is reportedly due to reach $3.7 billion this year, compared with Armenia’s defense budget projected at $1.4 billion. Despite this disparity and its continuing military build-up, Baku has angrily denounced Armenia’s recent arms deal with a number of other countries and France in particular. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian rejected the criticism late last week.
“They say that the European Union, the West are arming Armenia, but Azerbaijan is buying weapons from Slovakia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Italy, France’s neighbor,” Pashinian told a news conference. “Why can Azerbaijan get weapons from Italy but Armenia can't get them from France? At least three EU member states have military-technical cooperation with Azerbaijan.”
Pashinian did not mention Baku’s deals with Israeli arms manufacturers which led his government to recall the Armenian ambassador in Tel Aviv just days after the outbreak of the 2020 Karabakh war. Although Azerbaijani-Israeli military cooperation appears to have continued unabated since then, Yerevan sent a new ambassador to Israel in April 2022.