Police in Azerbaijan’s capital Baku raided the local office of Russian state news agency Sputnik on June 30, amid rising tensions between Baku and Moscow.
Sputnik’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan said online she could not reach members of her staff, while local media announced two employees of Russia’s Federal Security Service had been detained during the operation.
Russian diplomats expressed concern that they had been unable to contact the detained journalists for over two hours.
Here is the police cordon outside of our Sputnik office in Baku.
We are unable to reach our Azerbaijan bureau staff by phone after local media announced a "special security operation" against our staff, which includes Russian citizens. Representatives from our embassy are… pic.twitter.com/Ki87PIxI6X
— Margarita Simonyan (@M_Simonyan) June 30, 2025
Azerbaijani authorities have not disclosed an exact reason for the search on the Sputnik office. However, it followed the deaths of two Azerbaijani citizens during a June 27 Russian police operation in the city of Yekaterinburg in the Ural mountains.
In response, Azerbaijan’s government cancelled a planned Russian cultural event on June 29, and the suspension of other Russian state and private cultural programmes.
Russian investigators said both slain individuals, Huseyn and Ziyaddin Safarov, were Russian passport holders of Azerbaijani descent, and claimed the deaths occurred during raids related to unsolved serial killings.
One reportedly died of heart failure, while the other’s cause of death was under medical investigation.
Baku has accused Russian authorities of extrajudicial killings based on the victims’ ethnicity, an allegation the Kremlin denies.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov expressed regret over Azerbaijan’s response, insisting the police actions in Yekaterinburg were legitimate and should not prompt a diplomatic fallout.
Azerbaijan’s cultural ministry said it was cancelling cultural events by Russian state and private organisations due to “the demonstrative targeted and extrajudicial killings and acts of violence committed by Russian law enforcement agencies”.
