Security forces in Baku raided the offices of Sputnik Azerbaijan, a Kremlin-backed news agency, on Monday, amid recent deterioration in relations between Russia and Azerbaijan.
The operation, first reported by local media outlet Minval, was confirmed by Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs. The reasons for the search have not yet been disclosed.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said on Monday afternoon that Russian diplomats had been unable to contact staff inside the Sputnik office for over two hours. Access to the editorial premises was denied, and no explanation was provided, she said.
Several Azerbaijani news outlets, including APA and Vesti.az, cited anonymous sources claiming that two officers of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) had been detained during the raid. According to these reports, the individuals had been operating under journalistic cover at Sputnik Azerbaijan — a local branch of Rossiya Segodnya, a state-owned media group whose subsidiaries include news agency RIA Novosti.
The journalists have been identified as Sputnik Azerbaijan head Igor Kartavykh and editor Yevgeny Belousov. In turn, the Russian Foreign Ministry summoned the Azerbaijani ambassador to Moscow “in connection with Baku’s unfriendly actions and the illegal detention of Russian journalists”, Zakharova said.
Tensions between the two countries have been escalating in recent days. The raid comes after the arrest in Russia of several Azerbaijani nationals in the Russian Urals city of Yekaterinburg, linked to an investigation into a series of murders from the early 2000s.
Two suspects — brothers Huseyn and Ziyaddin Safarov — died under unclear circumstances during the raid. Russian investigators claimed one died of heart failure, while the cause of the other’s death is still being clarified. However, their family members said that the brothers had been killed.
The deaths prompted a sharp reaction from Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry, which demanded a full investigation. In response to the incident, Baku cancelled all Russian-organised cultural events in the country and suspended both a planned visit by a parliamentary delegation to Moscow and a visit by Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexey Overchuk to Baku.
Russia’s human rights commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova has since appealed to the Prosecutor General’s Office to review the legality of the arrests in Yekaterinburg.