By Sultan Musayev | 2025-03-13

ALMATY -- Baku's displeasure with Moscow has cost the Kremlin a venue for its propaganda operations.

Azerbaijan recently shuttered the local bureau of the Russian state media group Rossiya Segodnya, which operates both RIA Novosti and Sputnik, known instruments of the Kremlin's foreign propaganda.

The European Union, Britain and Canada have sanctioned Rossiya Segodnya, accusing it of spreading disinformation and pro-Russian propaganda following Moscow's invasion of Ukraine three years ago.

"The Rossiya Segodnya bureau in Azerbaijan is closed," Aykhan Hajizada, the spokesperson for Azerbaijan's Foreign Ministry, told journalists February 24. "From now on, they may operate in Azerbaijan with only one correspondent."

Baku's order to shut down the local Rossiya Segodnya operation seemed to take Moscow by surprise.

"We have made our Azerbaijani counterparts aware of our position on this matter, which is important for us and, I believe, just as important for Baku," Russia's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said at a briefing on February 27. "We are expecting a constructive response."

Zakharova expressed hope that the parties would be able to reach a "compromise" and a "mutually acceptable solution."

To date, there has not been any news about the outcome of any communication between the two countries.

Defending national interests

Relations between Baku and Moscow have soured after Azerbaijan claimed that an Azerbaijan Airlines jet, which crashed December 25, had been accidentally fired upon from Russian territory.

In the wake of that incident, Baku on February 3 ordered the Russian House cultural center in the capital to halt its activities.

Russian House is a representative body of Rossotrudnichestvo, Russia's cultural exchange agency known to promote Russian soft power and propaganda.

Baku said it was defending its national interests and would not tolerate outside influence in its domestic affairs.

"Our country has become a donor itself and does not need help from outside, especially when such assistance is based on non-transparent schemes, and the structure of organizations is clearly intelligence-oriented," the news site Report.az wrote on February 6, citing what it characterized as knowledgeable government sources.

Initially Russian officials, including Zakharova and Yevgeny Primakov, the director of Rossotrudnichestvo, said they hoped the matter would be resolved. But on February 11, workers removed the signs on the Russian House building.

Distancing from Moscow

The restrictions placed on Rossiya Segodnya in Azerbaijan indicate that Baku has decided to further distance itself from Moscow, said Zhyldyz Aliyeva, a commentator for the Kazakh newspaper Delovaya Nedelya (Business Week).

"Obviously the first step in this direction was to scrub the national media space of Russian influence, and specifically, of Kremlin disinformation and propaganda," she told Kontur.

For many years the Kremlin has used Sputnik to execute its agenda in Azerbaijan and to report on events from Moscow's point of view.

This behavior includes trying to form a positive public perception of Russia's war against Ukraine as a "special military operation to defend Donbas," and denigrating Kyiv's allies, the Western countries.

In addition to official media outlets, the Kremlin uses so-called troll factories, contracted bloggers who spread propaganda online that supports the actions of the Russian authorities and attacks their critics.

Lukpan Akhmedyarov, a journalist from Uralsk, Kazakhstan, and the former editor-in-chief of the newspaper Uralskaya Nedelya, actively combats aggressive Russian propaganda in Kazakhstan and advocates for restricting Russian media outlets in the country.

"Russian state or government-controlled media outlets have too strong an influence on our citizens' minds," Akhmedyarov told Kontur.

"Even though decades have passed, to this day many people are nostalgic for the Soviet Union and watch Russian channels."

Brainwashing by propaganda outlets is a national security threat, Akhmedyarov said.

Need for neutralizing threats

Meanwhile, on the same day that Baku announced the closure of the Rossiya Segodnya office, Azerbaijan's Special Communication and Information Security State Service disclosed that the country's state information resources had come under a mass cyberattack.

"Powerful forces" were behind the cyberattacks and Azerbaijan needs to co-operate with allied countries to neutralize emerging threats, lawmaker Tural Ganjaliyev said at a plenary session of parliament February 28.

Ganjaliyev diplomatically refrained from mentioning Russia, but many Azerbaijani analysts have been more direct.

Abulfaz Babazadeh, deputy editor-in-chief at Bakinskiy Rabochiy newspaper, called the incidents a "national security challenge" that may be coming "from the north."

Moscow does not like how Baku is behaving with regard to the plane crash, while shuttering Russian House aggravated tensions between the countries, he said.

"Russia knows how to play on the information fronts, and cyberattacks are a tactic it's been using for a long time, so specialists aren't ruling out the latest version [is Russian in origin]," Babazadeh wrote February 26 in Bakinskiy Rabochiy, a state-controlled Russian-language publication.

"Did the Russian cyber structures really decide to test the strength of Azerbaijan’s system?"