Deprivation of Russian citizenship of Azerbaijani immigrants points to coordinated campaign

Pressure on people of Azerbaijani descent in Russia, including a number of cases of deprivation of citizenship, has become a sign of a campaign inspired from above. In Azerbaijan itself, these cases attract public attention, but are overshadowed by other aspects of the conflict between official Baku and Moscow.

As "Kavkazsky Uzel" wrote, Azerbaijani businessman Arshad Khankishiev, former head of the national-cultural autonomy of Azerbaijanis in the Chelyabinsk region, which was liquidated by the court, was deprived of Russian citizenship.

Conflict specialist Arif Yunusov noted that few people in Azerbaijan care about the deprivation of citizenship of Azerbaijanis in Russia. "There was a reaction only at first after the events in Yekaterinburg. Although we regularly receive such reports from Russia, the reports from Yekaterinburg caused a real explosion, especially in the mass media and on social networks, but now this has died down. More attention is now being drawn to the attacks on SOCAR facilities in Ukraine. Another thing is that anti-Russian sentiments are strong in Azerbaijan," he said.

The source emphasized that large-scale pressure on Azerbaijanis is currently being exerted in Russia. According to him, "the Ministry of Internal Affairs has sent instructions to regional departments to raise all cases involving Azerbaijanis over the past ten years and review them."

"Russia is using the diaspora as one of the few levers of pressure on Azerbaijan. We are not Armenia or Georgia, and you can't scare Azerbaijan with a ban on tomato exports. More than 2.2 million Azerbaijanis live in Russia, and they send good money home. Therefore, the main thing that worries Azerbaijanis now is whether they will be deported from Russia or not. This will probably not happen, and the blow will fall on the oligarchs close to Ilham Aliyev,” Yunus noted.

The conflict specialist emphasized that escalation of tensions regularly occurs in Russian-Azerbaijani relations.

“In my book, published in 2007, I called the chapter on the relationship between the two countries “Russian-Azerbaijani relations: friendship and cooperation based on suspicion and mistrust.” The presidents meet, hug, but at the same time each has a dagger hidden in his bosom. So far, the most severe crisis was in 1999 after the start of the second Chechen war, when wounded Chechens were treated in Baku. Russia then even began deporting Azerbaijanis. Only then did Heydar Aliyev, who was then president, get rid of the Chechens and normalize relations,” Yunus said.

The head of the Majlis of the Azerbaijani Musavat party, Arif Hajily, on the contrary, noted that the issue of oppression of Azerbaijanis in Russia is being discussed very seriously in the media and social networks. "They are discussing not only this, but also the attacks on SOCAR facilities in Ukraine and the actions of Russian television to denigrate Azerbaijan. Most people do not want the escalation to continue," he said.

"Those (Azerbaijanis) who have money, connections, and influence are under attack. We believe that this happened because of the peace talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and the initialing of the peace treaty seriously angered Russia," the politician said.

The actions of regional authorities to deprive natives of Azerbaijan of Russian citizenship are “a campaign (initiated) from above, which is supplemented by initiatives from below, as always happens with such campaigns,” says political scientist Andrei Kolesnikov.

In his opinion, this campaign is similar to the persecution of people from Georgia before the war in 2008. “Since the actual foreign policy line in relation to Azerbaijan is not clearly defined, the system is focused on repression and unfriendly acts, which are only multiplying - from arrests of Azerbaijanis to strikes on SOCAR terminals. As a result, Putin completed the process of losing the South Caucasus," the expert believes.

Relations between Moscow and Baku have noticeably worsened after the Azerbaijan Airlines plane with 67 people on board crashed in Kazakhstan on December 25, 2024, while flying from Baku to Grozny. You can read more about this in the "Caucasian Knot" reference "Baku-Grozny Air Crash" and in the article "Geopolitical Confrontation: What Did the AZAL Plane Crash Lead to?".

On June 28, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry called on the Russian authorities to investigate the deaths and injuries of Azerbaijanis who suffered on June 27 as a result of a special operation by security forces in Yekaterinburg. Experts in Baku called blunt force trauma the cause of death of brothers Huseyn and Ziyaddin Safarov, while the Russian side called a heart attack the cause of death.

The ethnic raids in Russia and the retaliatory detentions of Russians in Azerbaijan became a new round of deterioration in relations between the two countries. Baku accuses the Russian authorities of extrajudicial reprisals against Azerbaijanis, and footage of the brutal detention of Russians in Baku looks like a demonstrative response to Moscow's actions, according to the "Caucasian Knot" report "Crisis in Relations between Azerbaijan and Russia".