An Azerbaijani cargo plane has completed yet another flight to and from a military airfield in southern Israel, signaling ongoing Israeli arms supplies to Azerbaijan.
Flight data from Flight Radar24, a website that tracks international flights, indicates that a plane operated by Azerbaijani airline Silk Way returned to Baku on Wednesday from Ovda, an Israeli Air Force base. As with previous flights, the airline did not disclose the contents of the cargo transported to Azerbaijan.
Ovda is the only airfield in Israel authorized for the transport of explosives, making it a key route for Israeli exports of weapons and ammunition. Over the past two decades, these exports have amounted to billions of dollars, positioning Israel as one of Azerbaijan’s primary arms suppliers.
These arms supplies continued even during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, where Azerbaijani forces made extensive use of Israeli-made attack drones and multiple-launch rocket systems throughout the six-week conflict. During a visit to Israel in March 2023, Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov expressed gratitude to the Israeli government for its support.
In a report last year, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz noted that Azerbaijani cargo planes landed at the Ovda air base at least 92 times between 2016 and 2023. The report highlighted that the frequency of these flights increased in the lead-up to Azerbaijan’s September 2023 military offensive that regained full control over Karabakh.
The Ovda-Baku flights have continued even after the outbreak of the ongoing conflict in Gaza last October, which prompted Israel to seek and receive significant military aid from the United States. According to the Armenian investigative outlet Hetq.am, there were about a dozen such flights between November 2023 and April 2024.
Azerbaijan’s military expenditure is expected to reach $3.7 billion this year, compared to Armenia’s projected defense budget of $1.4 billion. Despite this gap and its ongoing military buildup, Azerbaijan has strongly criticized Armenia’s recent arms deals with several countries, particularly France. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan dismissed the criticism late last week.
“They claim that the European Union, the West are arming Armenia, but Azerbaijan is purchasing weapons from Slovakia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Italy, which is France’s neighbor,” Pashinyan said during a news conference. “Why can Azerbaijan acquire weapons from Italy, but Armenia cannot obtain them from France? At least three EU member states have military-technical cooperation with Azerbaijan.”
Pashinyan did not mention Azerbaijan’s deals with Israeli arms manufacturers, which had prompted his government to recall the Armenian ambassador from Tel Aviv just days after the start of the 2020 Karabakh war. Despite the apparent continuation of Azerbaijani-Israeli military cooperation, Yerevan appointed a new ambassador to Israel in April 2022.
