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The national airlines of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan have suspended some flights to Russia after evidence suggested an Azerbaijani plane had been downed by Russian air defence systems.

The Kazakh airline, Qazaq Air, said on Friday it suspended its Astana to Ekaterinburg route, according to the Kazinform news agency, while Azerbaijan Airlines suspended flights to seven cities in the south of Russia.

The measures were taken after an Azerbaijan Airlines flight from Baku to Russia’s regional capital, Grozny, was diverted across the Caspian Sea and crash-landed near Aktau in Kazakhstan on Wednesday, killing 38 of the 67 people on board.

Video of the fuselage of the crashed aircraft has shown multiple puncture marks consistent with fire from an anti-aircraft system. There is also evidence that Russia was jamming the GPS navigation system near Grozny at the time, apparently to defend against an attack by Ukrainian drones.

Qazaq Air said it was suspending flights to Ekaterinburg until January 27 pending an “ongoing risk assessment” of flights to Russia. Azerbaijan Airlines said it halted flights to Grozny and other southern Russian cities until completion of an investigation into the crash.

Israel’s flag-carrier, El Al, on Thursday also announced it was suspending flights from Tel Aviv to Moscow pending a safety assessment.

Russia had insisted the aircraft was unable to land in Grozny because of heavy fog and that the aircraft had hit a flock of birds. Local authorities in Russia’s nearby North Ossetia region announced an attack by Ukrainian drones, one of which was shot down, killing a woman on the ground. But the Kommersant newspaper reported there was no “heavy fog” forecast for Grozny at the time.

The head of Russia’s Rosaviatsia aviation agency, Dmitry Yadrov, on Thursday said the conditions around Grozny had been “very difficult” amid attacks from Ukrainian combat drones.

Asked on Friday about reports of a missile strike, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he had nothing to add.

The incident has invoked comparisons with Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 being shot down over Ukraine in 2014. An investigation concluded that crash, which killed all 298 people on board, was the result of the firing of an air defence missile by Russia-controlled fighters in eastern Ukraine.

It is not clear how long Kazakhstan’s investigation into the crash will take, or how free it will be to reach conclusions about the cause. The probe includes investigators from Russia and Azerbaijan, according to Kazakh officials.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said it was too early to comment on what had caused the crash.

The aircraft type involved — an Embraer-190 regional jet — was previously regarded as one of the world’s safest civil aircraft.

A senior US official has said there are early indications a Russian anti-aircraft system might have struck the flight.

Senior Ukrainian officials told the Financial Times they also believed the aircraft was probably hit by an air defence missile. Andriy Kovalenko, a Ukrainian national security and defence council official, posted on Telegram on Thursday that Russia should have closed the airspace over Grozny, given the operations it was undertaking, but did not do so.

“The plane was damaged by the Russians and sent to Kazakhstan, instead of making an emergency landing in Grozny and saving people’s lives,” he wrote.

Rasim Musabekov, a member of Azerbaijan’s parliament, has called for Russia to apologise.

“The plane was shot down in Russian territory, in the skies over Grozny, and this cannot be denied,” Musabekov told the Turan news agency. “This is how civilised relations work. If air defence systems are active, the airport should be closed, and warnings should be issued to prevent flights to the area.”

• Pro-Trump tech leaders and MAGA loyalists are feuding over how to overhaul US immigration.
• A debate over high-skill immigration intensified between the two groups in recent days.
• The debate came after Trump’s appointment of an Indian-born tech leader as a senior policy advisor.

President-elect Donald Trump’s backers in Silicon Valley are at odds with his MAGA loyalists over a key issue: immigration.

In recent days, Elon Musk and others in the tech sector have increasingly shared support for visas that allow companies to hire highly-skilled workers from overseas. The move has riled up Trump backers in favor of stricter immigration rules in the process.

The recent debate came after Trump offered Sriram Krishnan, a Chennai-born, Indian-American investor, a role as a senior policy advisor for artificial intelligence — a move that triggered heated criticisms online.

Krishnan, who was recently in London leading an expansion of venture capital firm A16z’s — previously lived in the US, where he completed stints at Microsoft, Twitter, and Meta from 2005.

Criticisms have largely come from anonymous accounts online — one X post asked if anyone had voted “for this Indian to run America,” prompting a defense from Trump’s AI and crypto czar David Sacks.

They also prompted a wider debate on the merits of the H-1B visa commonly used to employ skilled workers from other countries.

Tech leaders such as Musk, who have been deeply critical of illegal immigration, have used the saga to defend immigration that prioritizes the transfer of high-skilled foreign workers into American companies.

On Thursday, Musk said his priority was bringing in top engineering talent legally — saying it is “essential for America to keep winning.”

“Thinking of America as a pro sports team that has been winning for a long time and wants to keep winning is the right mental construct,” he wrote on X.

Musk’s co-lead at the Department of Government Efficiency, Vivek Ramaswamy, also took to X on Thursday. He argued that tech companies often hire foreign-born engineers, saying it allowed them to avoid what he called an American culture that has “venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.”

“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he wrote in an almost 400-word post.

In a later post, he said immigration rules should be reformed more effectively to funnel talent to the US. The H-1B system was not effective, he said, and “should be replaced with one that focuses on selecting the very best of the best.”

Marc Benioff, the boss of Salesforce, also weighed in, offering a solution to keep the “best and brightest” foreign students in the US after graduation: “Can we staple a US green card to every degree earned at an American university?”

The pro-immigration messages haven’t gone down well with everyone in the Trump pack.

Former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, who Trump briefly put forward to be his Attorney General, wrote an X post on Thursday saying that tech figures should butt out.

When Republicans embraced them, he said, “We did not ask them to engineer an immigration policy.”

Meanwhile, far-right activist and Trump supporter Laura Loomer used several posts to express strong opposition to H-1B visas and her concerns over the “replacement of American tech workers by Indian immigrants.”

Where Trump will land on the issue remains to be seen. Immigration lawyers have warned tech workers that a “storm is coming” with the arrival of a second Trump term, and suggested those who have left to get back before it’s too late.

The debate signals a deep divide between different groups of Trump supporters as he prepared to take office.

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Donald Trump’s embrace of cryptocurrencies risks undermining Europe’s incoming rules on digital assets as companies overlook the continent in favour of a friendlier US market, industry executives have warned.

Companies such as Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, have indicated they will look to refocus their attention on the US after Trump promised to make the country “the crypto capital of the planet”.

Top executives and analysts say a crypto-friendly White House will exert a strong pull that compares favourably to the European Union’s new landmark rules, which come into force from December 30.

The bloc’s rules, known as the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA), will set guardrails for the public following the collapse of companies like exchange FTX and lenders including Genesis and Celsius. The standards have in the past been praised by the industry as a potential benchmark for global crypto asset regulation.

“In the previous US administration . . . MiCA certainly seemed like it was a good way of trying to think about the crypto industry without completely killing off innovation,” said Eswar Prasad, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. 

But in the wake of Trump’s win, “we’re going to see a migration of crypto-related activities away from Europe in any form because things are going to be much easier in the US,” he added. “[MiCA] is going to be seen as very stringent.”

Trump’s victory has helped propel bitcoin to a record high of $108,000 this year, more than double its price a year ago. Retail and institutional investors have warmed to Trump’s pledge that he will end the US’s tough regulatory crackdown of recent years.

He has also nominated Paul Atkins, a crypto advocate, to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, and appointed David Sacks, a venture capitalist, to advise the president on crypto and AI policy. “We’re going to do something great with crypto,” he said last week.

The EU’s MiCA rules will regulate the issuance of crypto coins including stablecoins, as well as digital asset services like custody and trading by demanding that companies providing those services are authorised in the EU.

Yulia Makarova, special counsel at law firm Cooley, said complying with MiCA “increases the costs for start-up firms” in particular. “Ongoing compliance costs can be such that the business gets to the brink of viability,” she added, warning that crypto start-ups may choose to launch in the US rather than the EU.

Some companies, such as US cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and Circle, operator of the stablecoin USDC, have secured their EU licences. However others, such as Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin, will not be compliant with the new rules and are being delisted by local regulated exchanges.

“The new administration might take a bit of shine and a bit of edge off MiCA,” said Denzel Walters, head of Luxembourg at market maker B2C2. “But I still think MiCA here presents a really great opportunity for the digital assets market,” he added.

Executives are betting that Trump, as well as a new cohort of pro-crypto politicians in Washington, will also make headway with new legislation for crypto assets, which will in turn pave the way for traditional financial institutions to plough money into crypto.

Already, crypto companies that dropped US services for fear of being hit by regulators, or were banned, are planning to return. “We are closer than ever to restoring US dollar services and our plan is to achieve this important milestone in early 2025,” said Norman Reed, interim chief executive of crypto exchange Binance US. “It is not a matter of if, but when,” he added.