Archive July 1, 2025

In 2001, a man was stabbed to death near a lakeside restaurant in Yekaterinburg, an urban centre in Russia’s Ural Mountains region.

With his dying breath, he whispered the names of his alleged killers to the police, local media claimed.

The man and his presumed murderers were ethnic Azeris, Turkic-speaking Muslims whose families fled to Russia in the 1990s after the war in Nagorno-Karabakh, an Azeri region dominated by ethnic Armenians.

But it took Russian authorities 24 years to identify and detain the presumed suspects – even though they ran the restaurant and never went into hiding.

Two alleged suspects died while being rounded up on Friday. One suffered a “heart attack” while the other suspect’s cause of death “is being established”, according to Russian prosecutors.

They also purported that the suspects were part of “a criminal group” allegedly involved in other murders and the sale of counterfeit alcohol that killed 44 people in 2021.

The prosecutors provided no answers as to why the presumed “criminals” were at large for so long – and did not elaborate on the apparently brutal manner in which they were detained.

The deaths triggered a diplomatic storm that may contribute to a tectonic shift in the strategic South Caucasus region, Russia’s former stamping ground, where Azerbaijan won Nagorno-Karabakh back in 2020, and Turkiye is regaining its centuries-old clout.

Azerbaijan slams Russia’s ‘unacceptable violence’

The spat has so far resulted in the arrest of two Russian intelligence officers in Azerbaijan, the shutdown of a Kremlin-funded media outlet there, and the cancellation of “cultural events” sponsored by Moscow.

Russian police and intelligence officers used “unacceptable violence” that killed two brothers, Ziyaddin Safarov and Gusein Safarov, and left their relatives severely injured, Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Saturday.

One of the injured men reportedly said masked officers began breaking his front door at dawn, frightening his children.

The officers “turned the house upside down and kept beating us for an hour without asking anything”, Mohammed Safarov told the MediaAzNews website.

He said his elderly father was also beaten and electrocuted for hours and claimed they were both requested to “volunteer” to fight Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Other Azeri media outlets published photos of bruises and wounds the men claimed were caused by Russian officers.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday, in response to a question about Azerbaijan’s reactions,  “We sincerely regret such decisions”.

He added, “We believe that everything that’s happening (in Yekaterinburg) is related to the work of law enforcement agencies, and this cannot and should not be a reason for such a reaction. ”

But Emil Mustafayev, a political analyst based in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, said the incident highlighted a xenophobic strain in Russia.

“The killing of Azeris is a link in the chain of tendentious politics where ethnic minorities are used as a lightning rod,” he said. “This is not just a tragedy, this is a symptom of a deep sickness of the Russian society. ”

The Azeri diaspora in Russia is at least two million strong, but they face discrimination, police brutality and hate attacks.

“The Kremlin has long ago mastered a trick – when domestic dissent is on the rise, there is a need to switch attention to ‘the enemies from within’, be that Ukrainians, Tajiks, Uzbeks or, like now, Azeris,” Mustafayev added.

The Kremlin uses state propaganda, police brutality and the taciturn approval of top officials to create an atmosphere of violence against migrants that is “seen as normal, as inevitable”, he said.

Back in the 1990s, Azeri migrants nearly monopolised fruit trade and mini-bus transportation in Russian urban centres.

Many still run countless shops selling vegetables and flowers.

“We are the boogeymen, cops always need to check our documents and need no excuse to harass us and call us names even after they see my Russian passport,” an ethnic Azeri owner of a flower shop near a major railway station in Moscow told Al Jazeera, on condition of anonymity.

Until the early 2000s, the Azeris “undoubtedly were the number one” most-hated ethnic minority in Russia, until the arrival of labour migrants from Russia’s North Caucasus and ex-Soviet Central Asia, said Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s Bremen University.

Since then, some ultra-nationalists and skinheads who considered Azeris their main enemies joined law enforcement agencies, he added.

“So, the cruelty in Yekaterinburg may have been caused by” the decades-old hatred, Mitrokhin told Al Jazeera.

Strained ties

Other geopolitical factors contributed to anti-Azeri sentiments in Russia.

In 2020, Azerbaijan put an end to the seemingly unsolvable political deadlock over Nagorno-Karabakh.

“The success undoubtedly became possible thanks to Turkiye’s military aid,” Alisher Ilkhamov, head of Central Asia Due Diligence, a think tank in London, told Al Jazeera.

Baku bought advanced Turkish-made Bayraktar drones that could easily strike large groups of Armenian and separatist soldiers, together with their trenches, tanks and trucks.

An Azeri-Turkish alliance emerged, “allowing Baku to get rid of Moscow’s obtrusive ‘peacekeeping’ mission and depriving it of a chance to manipulate the Azeri-Armenian conflict to keep both [Azerbaijan and Armenia] in its political orbit”, he said.

The alliance tarnished Moscow’s clout in South Caucasus, while Baku sympathised with Kyiv in the Russian-Ukrainian war, he said.

Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev also accused Russia of obstructing an investigation into the downing of an Azeri passenger plane over Chechnya last December.

The plane was apparently hit by panicking Russian air defence forces during a Ukrainian drone attack on Grozny, Chechnya’s administrative capital.

Aliyev also refused to take part in the May 9 parade on Moscow’s iconic Red Square to commemorate Russia’s role in defeating Nazi Germany in 1945.

Baku fiercely resists the Kremlin’s campaign to forcibly enlist Azeri labour migrants to join Russia’s war effort in Ukraine.

After nearly 14 years of war in Syria, the new government is resetting its regional relations, and a lot of focus is on what will happen with Israel.

There are reports of talks between Syria and Israel, with timelines even being floated for potential normalisation between the two countries, which have technically been at war since the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

Here’s what you need to know about possible normalisation between Syria and Israel:

What has happened so far?

Syria and Israel have held direct talks, according to Israeli media, about potentially entering into a normalisation agreement.

Communication between the two states has reportedly been facilitated by the United Arab Emirates, which established a backchannel for contact.

Any agreement would likely be an extension of the Abraham Accords, an agreement brokered by the United States between some Arab states and Israel.

The Abraham Accords were a top-down approach by Donald Trump during his first term as US president to get Arab states to formalise relations with Israel.

They were signed in August and September 2020 by the UAE and Bahrain, and soon followed by Sudan and Morocco.

Since then, Trump has worked to expand the accords by pushing more countries to sign agreements with Israel.

Trump visited three countries in the Middle East in May, and, while in Saudi Arabia, he met Syria’s new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, and reportedly encouraged him to normalise relations with Israel.

Is normalisation possible?

Possibly down the road, analysts say, but right now it would be nearly impossible, according to Syrian writer and author Robin Yassin-Kassab.

There is a deep enmity between Syria and Israel, which heightened during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and Israel’s occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights.

Israeli Defence Minister Gideon Saar said his country would insist on its occupation of the Golan Heights in any deal with Syria, and the Israeli army has gone deeper into the Golan, occupying homes and expelling people from the area.

Many Syrians would oppose giving up the Golan to Israel, according to analysts. Still, many might welcome common-sense negotiations.

“Syrians are split … because on the one hand people are exhausted, everyone recognises Syria cannot defend itself or fight Israel … so it’s good [al-Sharaa’s] negotiating,” Yassin-Kassab said, adding that a return to an agreement like the 1974 ceasefire is the most realistic option.

About a week after then-President Bashar al-Assad fled Syria in December 2024, Israel’s parliament voted on a plan to expand settlements in Syria – illegal under international law. There are currently more than 31,000 Israeli settlers in the occupied Golan Heights.

Syria, under al-Sharaa, has said it is open to peace with Israel and that it would uphold a 1974 ceasefire agreement between the two states, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on December 8 – the day al-Assad fled to Moscow – that he viewed the agreement as void.

Israel attacked Syria repeatedly, destroying much of its military infrastructure and seizing Syrian territory near the border with Syria’s Golan Heights.

Syria would likely ask for Israel to withdraw from the newly occupied area under a new non-aggression deal, though reports say the Golan Heights have not yet been discussed.

What moves have been made lately?

In recent days, Israeli officials have said they are open to a deal with Syria, and Netanyahu reportedly asked US Special Envoy Tom Barrack to help negotiate one.

Israel’s National Security Council head, Tzachi Hanegbi, has reportedly been overseeing discussions with Syrian officials. The talks include a US presence and are in “advanced stages”, according to senior Israeli officials who spoke to The Times of Israel.

Figures close to al-Sharaa are reportedly asking for an end to Israeli aggression without Syria having to accept full normalisation, Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar reported.

What would Syria want from talks with Israel?

Syria wants the Israeli attacks on Syrian territory to cease.

There are concerns over Israel’s expanded occupation of the Golan Heights among many Syrians; however, it’s unclear if al-Sharaa’s government will demand the return of the occupied parts.

Syria would, however, want Israel to pull out of the Golan proper and the parts it occupied over the last year.

Israel also threatened the new Syrian government  not to  deploy soldiers south of Damascus, a region near its border with Israel.

Israel has also tried to stoke sectarianism in this area, threatening to intervene to “protect the Syrian Druze” during sectarian-driven tensions between groups affiliated with the new Syrian government and Syria’s minority Druze community.

While many in the Druze community have shown a distrust of Syria’s new government, many have also denounced Israel’s threats of intervention as a calculated stunt to cause further discord among Syrians.

What would Israel want?

Netanyahu reportedly wants a security agreement – an update on the 1974 text – with a framework towards a total peace plan with Syria.

US envoy Barrack claims the issue between Syria and Israel is “solvable” and has suggested they begin with a “non-aggression agreement”, according to Axios.

Such a continued occupation of the Golan would likely upset many Syrians.

“It’s too politically difficult [for al-Sharaa], even under American pressure and the continued threat of violence from Israel,” Yassin-Kassab said.