Baku issues warrants for three Russian pundits over ‘hostile actions against Azerbaijan’

Azerbaijan says it issued an international arrest warrant against three Russian journalists for making calls to overthrow the government in Baku. The remarks also pushed Azerbaijan to summon Russia’s ambassador, with several pro-government Azerbaijani media outlets producing lengthy hit pieces against the three journalists and Russia’s own policies.

The latest spat comes as Azerbaijan’s relations with Russia have appeared to be on the upswing, with President Ilham Aliyev saying in July that ties had been ‘fully normalised’ after almost a year of unprecedented tensions. The fallout was ignited after Russia mistakenly targeted an Azerbaijan Airlines (AZAL) jet in 2024 with anti-aircraft missiles, causing the plane to crash and 38 of its passengers and crew to die.

On Monday, Azerbaijan’s Prosecutor General’s office announced it had submitted an international arrest warrant against three Russian nationals — Moscow 24 journalist Ivan Knyazev of the TV channel Moscow 24, media expert Semyon Uralov, and Aleksei Chadayev, a journalist and adviser at Russia’s Transport Ministry. It accused the three of calling for a ‘forcible change to Azerbaijan’s constitutional order and the undermining of its territorial integrity, as well as inciting inter-ethnic hatred and hostility’.

According to the Prosecutor General’s Office, the three had made the remarks on the YouTube show Chistota Ponimaniya (Clarity of Understanding) in mid-July — which is no longer available online.

The Prosecutor General’s Office also claimed that ‘they openly called for terrorism’ in another Chistota Ponimaniya episode on 13 August, and they expressed ‘views advocating the use of violent methods against Azerbaijan’, including ‘direct threats of physical destruction and the targeted elimination of specific individuals’.

‘As these individuals were outside the territory of Azerbaijan, they were declared wanted, and court orders were issued for their arrest as a preventive measure’, the agency’s statement said.

On Tuesday, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry summoned Russia’s Ambassador to Azerbaijan, Mikhail Evdakimov, to convey its ‘serious concern and strong protest’ over the ‘provocative, insulting, and threatening statements’ made by the three journalists, pointing to the Chistota Ponimaniya interview, in addition to two other broadcasts — one produced by the state-run Sputnik radio and another on the TV channel Spas — which called for the inclusion of ‘Azerbaijani leadership in Russia’s list of terrorists and extremists’.

On Tuesday evening, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova expressed her country’s readiness to provide legal protection to the three Russian nationals.

Zakharova said the statements made by the three ‘do not reflect Moscow’s position regarding Azerbaijan’.

‘We cannot help but note that narratives unfriendly to Russia are constantly present in Azerbaijan’s information space’, Zakharova said, according to RBC.

On Wednesday, independent Russian media outlet the Moscow Times reported that Chadayev stepped down from his position as adviser at the Russian Transport Ministry.

The pundits hit back

On Tuesday, the day before his resignation, Chadayev commented on the situation to the Russian media outlet RBC, saying that he ‘disagrees with the accusations of inciting ethnic hatred’.

‘I have always held the Azerbaijani people in high regard and never spoken ill of them. My political commentary concerned the actions of the Azerbaijani leadership — a topic open to discussion in any format — but inciting conflict between peoples is certainly not something I would do’, he said.

Chadayev also stated on Russian media outlet Reporters that ‘following the escalation of the conflict with Baku and his being placed on an international wanted list, he began receiving threats from Azerbaijani citizens’.

He claimed to have been receiving such threats from Ukrainians since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

‘Now, representatives of the fraternal Azerbaijani people have joined the Ukrainians in significant numbers’, he said.

Chadayev denied that direct calls for violence were made on Chistota Ponimaniya. He said that the programme’s participants ‘discussed possible ways for Moscow to respond to Baku’s actions — including the use of force — but did not call for such measures to be actually implemented’.

‘We didn’t call for anything; we were simply discussing options for how exactly Azerbaijan could be punished for all the insolence it directs at us. It was a cool, rational discussion of options — any options, including the use of force’, he stated.

Chadayev accused Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev of behaving like a mafia boss, and said ‘his reaction resembles an attempt to signal to the Kremlin that he is the one in charge here’.

He said that ‘Baku’s confidence had been bolstered by the weakening of Russian influence in Armenia and the transfer of Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan’s full control’, and that Aliyev ‘may have concluded that Moscow’s capabilities in the South Caucasus had significantly diminished’.

According to Russian media outlet RBC, Uralov said that Azerbaijan was ‘a republic where arbitrary lawlessness runs rampant’, adding that Aliyev ‘makes statements that are blatantly pro-Kyiv, and the country’s leadership has shifted to a stance hostile toward Russia’.

Azerbaijan sics pro-government media on the Russian experts

Several prominent Azerbaijani pro-government media outlets published lengthy pieces dissecting the interviews the Prosecutor General’s Office charges.

Caliber wrote that what had pushed the media experts to make these remarks was a statement Aliyev had made at the Shusha Global Media Forum of July. There, he touched on Russia’s colonial pasts, which Caliber says ‘did not sit well with everyone in Russia’.

It cited one of those wanted by Azerbaijan, host Ivan Knyazev, as saying that the statements amounted to ‘hostile actions against Russia’ and calling on Russian authorities to ‘pressure representatives of the Azerbaijani diaspora into making statements condemning Baku’s actions’.

Caliber went on to say that Chadayev had gone ‘the furthest on that occasion’ by arguing that Azerbaijan should return ‘historically Armenian lands illegally conquered by Azerbaijani aggressors’ and to ‘return territories’ to Iran.

In that episode, Chadayev called for the strengthening of Russia’s Caspian Fleet in order to launch ‘an amphibious operation in Baku’.

APA, another pro-government media outlet, noted that Chadayev’s work at the Russian Transport Ministry ‘adds to the seriousness of the matter’.

‘He is not merely a journalist or political commentator; since January 2026, he has served as an adviser to Russian Transport Minister Andrei Nikitin’, APA wrote. ‘Prior to that, he served as an adviser to Vyacheslav Volodin, Speaker of the Russian State Duma’.

APA said that the remarks made by the three Russian nationals ‘shows that Russia has still not abandoned its “old games” and traditional, outdated scenarios’.