Vladimir Putin and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev meet in Baku, Azerbaijan, 19 August 2024. Photo: EPA/VYACHESLAV PROKOFYEV / SPUTNIK / KREMLIN POOL

An Azerbaijani former director of Moscow’s Satire Theatre, one of Russia’s most renowned playhouses, has been released from custody after a diplomatic agreement was reached by Moscow and Baku earlier this week, state-affiliated business daily Kommersant reported on Friday, citing comments by top Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov.

According to Kommersant, Mamedali Agayev, 73, was released from a pre-trial detention centre on the same day as Russian journalist Igor Kartavykh was released from police custody and placed under house arrest in Azerbaijan’s capital Baku.

Kartavykh, the bureau chief of Sputnik Azerbaijan, a branch of Russia’s state-owned news outlet Sputnik, was detained in Baku in late June on fraud charges in a high-profile case reportedly linked to the actions of Russian law enforcement authorities towards Azerbaijanis earlier in summer.

Arrested in Moscow in late August, Agayev had been accused of embezzling 20 million rubles (€210,875) and was facing a potential sentence of up to 10 years in prison prior to his release.

According to Ushakov, Agayev and Kartavykh’s respective releases were agreed upon by Russian and Azerbaijani diplomats prior to a meeting by Vladimir Putin and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev on the sidelines of the Russia-Central Asia summit in Tajikistan on Thursday.

At that meeting, Putin for the first time admitted Russia’s responsibility for the downing of an Azerbaijani plane that crashed in the Kazakh city of Aktau in December, killing 38 people, and apologised for the incident.

Following his meeting with Putin, Aliyev described his country’s relations with Russia as having developed “successfully” this year, according to Russian tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets.

Though the Azerbaijani government has yet to comment publicly on the prisoner agreement, this week’s developments mark a sea change in bilateral relations between Moscow and Baku from the summer, when the two sides engaged in a tit-for-tat series of high-profile arrests following the deaths of two Azerbaijani citizens during large-scale police raids in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg in June.