It sounds like they'd made multiple attempts to land at Grozny and failed due to poor weather, were asking to divert back to Baku, and due to GPS interference were asking for vectors rather than being able to navigate to waypoints on their own. They may well not have been anywhere their flight plan would have indicated.
After they were shot at, they were not allowed by Russian authorities to land in Grozny or any of the other nearby Russian airports, but were told to divert across the Caspian Sea to another country.
During the crossing, they were subjected to GPS jamming by Russia, and damage from the missile caused them to lose most controls.
The heroic efforts of the pilots got them almost to the airport, but at least some people survived.
> they were not allowed by Russian authorities to land in Grozny or any of the other nearby Russian airports
They were not denied landing. It was not possible to land. The weather excluded visual approach, there was no ILS and landing with GPS wasn’t possible due to jamming, which started because of the drone attack.
There’s fair share of responsibility on Russian air defense which has not ensured safety of civilian aircraft, but that flight should not have happened in the first place, so that’s on Russian government which did not close the airspace in advance and on the airline which decided to continue flights despite that it has already been known that air defense us working in the area.
Total speculation but spurious reports of "Ukrainian drone attack" sounds suspicious. Would it possible that the "attack" was just the involved airliner wandering out of a designated safe area and flying into SAM coverage, by chance?
