Pakistan's Export Of Chinese-Designed Fighter Aircraft To Azerbaijan Highlights An Armaments Trade In Flux
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One of the most unusual sets of armament trade relationships can be found in the Caucasus. Azerbaijan, a longtime customer of both Russian and Israeli military equipment, has increasingly diversified its military purchases away from Russia by turning to Turkiye and Pakistan alongside Israel, which remains one of Baku’s most important armaments suppliers. The sale of Pakistani-built JF-17 fighter aircraft to Azerbaijan ultimately amounts to an indirect sale of a Chinese-designed military aircraft and associated Chinese-built components and munitions to Azerbaijan. While it amounts to the first sale of Chinese-origin fighter aircraft to a post-Soviet country, China has, however, exported other types of military equipment to Central Asian countries, as well as Belarus.
The Pakistan air force recently deployed five JF-17 fighter aircraft to Azerbaijan in a deployment that is likely intended to both facilitate a bilateral exercise and help the Azerbaijani air force prepare for the eventual delivery of its Pakistani-built JF-17 fighters.
According to a press release, the Pakistani JF-17 fighters and the accompanying Il-78 aerial refuelling/tanker aircraft undertook a non-stop 2600-kilometer flight from Kamra airbase, which is in Pakistan’s Punjab province, to Baku, Azerbaijan. Given recent clashes between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which likely resulted in the purposeful avoidance of Afghan airspace notwithstanding Taliban-ruled Afghanistan’s non-existent air defences, and the claimed flight distance, which is grossly excessive if the Pakistani aircraft transited Iranian airspace, the six Pakistan air force aircraft appear to have transited over the Karakoram Mountains to enter Chinese airspace and then flown over Kazakhstan, and perhaps Uzbekistan, and ultimately the Caspian Sea, to reach Baku.
While Azerbaijan has developed a close military relationship with Pakistan, Baku retains close ties with its longstanding armaments supplier, Israel, ties that have also notably not derailed bilateral relations between Azerbaijan and Turkiye despite tensions between Israel and Turkiye over the war in Gaza and Pakistan’s official position on the matter. Strengthening military ties between Pakistan and Turkiye, a decade-long dynamic, are likely to have facilitated the sale of Pakistani-built JF-17 fighters to Azerbaijan.
Strengthening Pakistan-Turkiye military and military industrial ties, which are primarily manifested in terms of Turkish armament sales to Pakistan, have caught the attention of India, not least in the aftermath of the brief May 2025 India-Pakistan War, a conflict in which Pakistan is reported to have made extensive use of Turkish-origin strike drones. India is, for its part, exporting armaments to Armenia, Azerbaijan’s long-time adversary and co-belligerent in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. It is possible, even likely, that New Delhi views the sale of armaments to Armenia with Turkish support and, to a lesser degree, Azerbaijan’s indirect support, for Pakistan in mind. India’s armament sales to Armenia are, however, also explained by New Delhi’s broad-based push to export armaments to essentially any country not named China or Pakistan. It also reflects, of course, Armenia’s search for a supplier of Soviet-pattern equipment compatible and, more generally, fairly inexpensive armaments, following Russia’s inability and/or unwillingness to intervene in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in its 2020-2023 iterations as well as Russia’s unavailability as a reliable supplier of armaments for the duration of the Russia-Ukraine War. This has also led to Armenia’s procurement of armaments from France, a dynamic that is, of course, also reflective of European efforts to wean Armenia out of Russia’s previously tight embrace in the context of the Russia-Ukraine War.
All things considered, the present-day Caucasus is a microcosm of larger diplomatic and military changes underway in many parts of the world. Pakistan’s export of a fairly small number of Chinese-designed JF-17 fighter aircraft to Azerbaijan would, in normal times, barely register, but it is worth noting given how it is indicative of an armaments trade in a state of flux.