Azerbaijani police raided the places of work of the Kremlin-backed media outlet Sputnik in Baku and detained people reportedly linked to Russian intelligence, prompting swift diplomatic retaliation from Moscow.
Azerbaijani media reported that two people arrested through the search had been members of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), although Russian reviews claimed that journalists had been detained. Russia’s Foreign Ministry condemned the arrests as “unfriendly actions by Baku” and summoned Azerbaijan’s ambassador to Moscow, accusing the nation of illegally detaining Russian journalists.
In response, a protest observe was delivered to the Azerbaijani ambassador in Moscow. Sputnik, the outlet on the middle of the controversy, is broadly thought to be a Kremlin mouthpiece identified for spreading pro-Russian narratives overseas.
The raid follows a wave of arrests within the Russian metropolis of Yekaterinburg over the weekend, the place authorities detained round 50 ethnic Azerbaijanis suspected of involvement in contract killings between 2001 and 2011. At least two folks reportedly died through the operation, together with one formally stated to have suffered coronary heart failure.
Baku condemned the Russian actions as “unacceptable” and summoned the Russian ambassador to specific its discontent. Azerbaijani officers have additionally pushed again towards what they understand as disproportionate concentrating on of their diaspora.
The diplomatic rift deepened additional when Azerbaijan cancelled a number of deliberate Russian cultural occasions in protest of the arrests, a transfer the Kremlin publicly criticized. Moscow stated it “strongly disagreed” with the choice and considered it as a part of a broader sample of hostility.
Underlying tensions had already been simmering because the downing of an Azerbaijani passenger airplane over the Chechen capital, Grozny, in late 2024, an incident for which Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a proper apology to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.
Source: www.dailysabah.com