Azerbaijan Arrests of Russian-Owned News Agency Staff, Escalating Tiff With Russia

Azerbaijani authorities on Tuesday jailed two staff members of Russia’s state-owned news agency, Sputnik, which police raided the day before, detaining seven staff in total and accusing the journalists of fraud, Euronews reported. 

Officials said the executive director and editor-in-chief of the Sputnik office in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, are being detained for four months for fraud, illegal entrepreneurship, and the legalization of property obtained by criminal means.  

The Azerbaijan Interior Ministry also said that Sputnik Azerbaijan allegedly paid for its operation using illegal funding sources after being shut down by the Azerbaijani government in February.  

Another Russian state-run media outlet, Ruptly, said one of its editors was arrested after trying to film the police raids at the Sputnik offices. 

Russia considers the raids at Sputnik Azerbaijan and the detention of its staff as “unfriendly acts by Baku and the illegal arrest of Russian journalists.” 

Both countries routinely crack down on their own journalists as well as foreign correspondents, and have virtually no press freedoms, according to Reporters Without Borders. 

Some believe the crackdown on the Russians in Baku is in retaliation for deadly raids by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) in the Russian central city of Yekaterinburg, where more than 50 Azerbaijanis were detained last Friday. 

Following the death of two Azerbaijani brothers in the raids, Huseyn and Ziyaddin Safarov, Azerbaijan accused Russia of ethnic profiling and police brutality: Forensic reports indicate that their deaths were due to blunt force trauma.  

Three other people were seriously injured in the FSB raids. 

Russia said that the raids in Yekaterinburg were part of an investigation into several murders from the early 2000s, according to the Associated Press. 

Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry condemned the operation as “brutal and unjustified.” The country also cancelled a scheduled trip to Moscow by Azerbaijani officials and all cultural events planned by Russia in a sign of protest.  

Diplomatic ties between Azerbaijan and Russia began to deteriorate in December, when an Azerbaijani airliner crashed in Kazakhstan.   

Azerbaijan had accused Russia of obstructing the investigation into the incident, which later showed that the plane was struck by the Russian air force in response to a Ukrainian drone attack on Grozny, Chechnya’s administrative capital, Al Jazeera wrote.