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The executive director and editor-in-chief of Russia's state-run news agency Sputnik in Azerbaijan have been sentenced to four months in prison on Tuesday, following a Baku police raid of the Russian state media affiliate the day before, in what appears to be a fast-moving escalation between the two countries.
According to Azerbaijan’s authorities, they have been found guilty of fraud, illegal entrepreneurship and legalisation of property obtained by criminal means, Baku-based international news channel AnewZ reported.
Azeri APA agency reported earlier that two employees of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) were among seven people detained after the raid on the offices of Sputnik Azerbaijan, owned by Rossiya Segodnya, which is in turn owned and operated by the Russian government.
Another Russian state-run media outlet, Ruptly, later reported that one of its editors had been detained after attempting to film the police action at the Sputnik offices in Baku.
Azerbaijan's Interior Ministry published a video showing officers leading two men to police vans in handcuffs.
The tensions between Azerbaijan and Russia escalated over the past few days following the detention of over 50 Azerbaijanis in Yekaterinburg in raids by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) last Friday.
Two people — brothers Huseyn and Ziyaddin Safarov — died during the raids, and three others were seriously injured. Russia claimed that the arrests were part of a murder investigation from the early 2000s.
Azerbaijan-based broadcaster AnewZ said the news of deadly raids sparked outrage and calls for justice amid what Azerbaijanis allege as abuse and ethnic profiling.
Some detainees have alleged that confessions were obtained through force, threats, and coercion, including pressure on family members.
Forensic experts have revealed that the Azerbaijani citizens killed during the Russian raids in Yekaterinburg died from blunt force trauma, not gunshot wounds, raising additional questions about the circumstances of the deaths.
Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry condemned the operation as “brutal and unjustified” and called on the Russian authorities to “conduct an urgent investigation into the matter and bring the perpetrators of this unacceptable violence to justice as soon as possible,” according to AnewZ.
In addition, Azerbaijan summoned Russia’s envoy to Baku to protest against the deadly raids and also cancelled all cultural events planned by the Russian state and private institutions in protest against the raid on Russia’s state-run Sputnik agency offices.
"In response to targeted and extrajudicial killings and acts of violence against Azerbaijanis based on their ethnicity, dem onstratively perpetrated by Russian law enforcement agencies in the Yekaterinburg region of the Russian Federation – and considering the systematic nature of such incidents in recent times – all cultural events planned in Azerbaijan involving Russian state and private entities have been cancelled," Azerbaijan’s ministry of Culture said in a statement.
Russia’s state-run agency in Azerbaijan
In February, the Azerbaijani government shut down Russia's state-funded news agency, Sputnik, but it has continued to operate, albeit with reduced staff.
Although the agency’s accreditation was officially revoked in February, the Azerbaijan Interior Ministry stated that its data indicated Sputnik Azerbaijan allegedly continued its activities using illegal funding sources.
The director of Sputnik's parent company Rossiya Segodnya, Dmitry Kiselev — one of the most prominent Russian propagandists, who regularly makes open calls to destroy Ukraine and attack Europe with Russian missiles — said Sputnik and Azerbaijani officials had been trying to find a temporary agreement allowing it to keep working in Baku.
Sputnik, Ruptly, and other affiliates of Rossiya Segodnya are widely regarded as tools for spreading the Kremlin's propaganda outside of Russia.
Kiselev expressed his disconnect over the Monday arrests on Telegram, calling it a “deliberate step aimed at worsening relations between the countries”.
Azerbaijan's parliament has pulled out of planned bilateral talks in Moscow amid the recent escalation and cancelled a visit by a Russian deputy prime minister.
Russian authorities denounced the state-run Sputnik office raid and detention as "unfriendly acts by Baku and the illegal arrest of Russian journalists."
In additional developments on Tuesday, Azerbaijan's Interior Ministry announced that it dismantled two criminal groups in Baku, detaining Russian nationals suspected of trafficking drugs from Iran and conducting cyber fraud operations.
Relations between Moscow and Baku cooled after an Azerbaijani airliner crashed in Kazakhstan in December, killing 38 of 67 people aboard.
As exclusively reported by Euronews, investigations into the incident revealed that the Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 was shot at by Russian air defence over Russia's Grozny and rendered uncontrollable by electronic warfare.
Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev accused Russia of trying to "hush up" the incident for several days. Russian President Vladimir Putin apologised to Aliyev for what he called a "tragic incident" but stopped short of acknowledging responsibility.
In May, Aliyev decided not to attend Russia’s 80th Victory Day celebrations.
