Azerbaijan jails eight Russian IT workers amid diplomatic row

A court in Baku has sentenced eight Russian IT specialists to up to four years in prison on drug charges, amid ongoing diplomatic tensions between Azerbaijan and Russia.

The Baku Grave Crimes Court on 19 June handed four-year sentences to Sergey Sofronov, Anton Drachev, Dmitry Bezugly, and Valery Dulov.

Four other defendants – Dmitry Fedorov, Boris Timoshov, Aleksey Vasilchenko, and Ilya Bezugly – were sentenced to three years in prison.

State prosecutors had previously sought longer terms of up to five years. All eight men were convicted under Azerbaijan's criminal code of large-scale drug trafficking as part of an organised group.

The convictions are the latest in a series of legal actions against Russian tech professionals in the country.

In April, Russian businessman and programmer Aleksandr Vaysero was sentenced to four years in prison for money laundering. In May, IT specialists Igor Zabolotskiy and Ilnur Valitov received three-year sentences after being accused of cybercrime and drug smuggling from Iran.

Independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta Europe reported that Azerbaijani investigators had split the detained Russian citizens into two distinct groups, targeting them with drug and cyber fraud charges respectively.

During earlier hearings, reports emerged that some of the detained men showed physical signs of violence, raising concerns over their treatment.write seo meta description

The trials come against a backdrop of severely strained relations between Moscow and Baku.

The diplomatic row intensified in June 2025 following police raids in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg, which targeted members of the ethnic Azerbaijani community. Two Azerbaijani men died and more than 50 people were detained during those operations.

The Russian Investigative Committee said the brothers Ziyaddin and Huseyn Safarov had died of heart failure. However, Azerbaijani forensic experts disputed this, concluding that the men died from multiple physical injuries.

Moscow maintained that the raids were part of investigations into contract killings dating back more than 10 years. In March, Shahin Shikhlinski, the head of the Azerbaijan-Ural national-cultural organisation, was convicted of organising one of the killings in 2001.

Following the Yekaterinburg raids, Azerbaijani authorities detained Igor Kartavykh, the director of Sputnik Azerbaijan, and Yevgeny Belousov, its editor-in-chief, in Baku.

The journalists were released in October 2025 following negotiations between Yuri Ushakov and Hikmet Hajiyev, aides to the Russian and Azerbaijani presidents.

Relations had already been fragile following an incident in December 2024, when a passenger plane belonging to Azerbaijan Airlines (AZAL) was shot down over Grozny, Chechnya. Baku demanded a formal apology, compensation, and the prosecution of those responsible.

A bilateral meeting in Dushanbe in October 2025 brought a temporary easing of tensions, where Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated his apologies and promised compensation. Although Moscow confirmed its readiness to pay the compensation in April 2026, the latest round of convictions in Baku suggests that deep political friction remains.