In a significant escalation of the allegations against Ramiz Mehdiyev, a longtime ally of former President Heydar Aliyev, Azerbaijani media has claimed that Mehdiyev planned to assassinate President Ilham Aliyev as part of a failed coup plot.
On Tuesday, 87-year-old Mehdiyev was arrested and charged with actions aimed at seizing state power, high treason, and the legalisation of property obtained by criminal means, and remanded into pre-trial detention.
The following day, the prominent pro-government media outlet APA published a lengthy article describing how Mehdiyev, ‘with the support of Russia, prepared a plan for a coup d’état and proposed it to Russia through his own channels’.
The details of the alleged plan further came into focus in an article by Vesti Baku on Friday, which cited unnamed sources as saying that the plot had been almost a year in the making, and that Russian President Vladimir Putin revealed the plans to Aliyev during their meeting in Dushanbe earlier in October.
Who is Mehdiyev?
Mehdiyev’s career spanned from the Soviet era up until 2019, when Aliyev dismissed him, ostensibly to make way for the next generation. He served as presidential aide under both Ilham Aliyev and his father Heydar, and is widely believed to have been a key figure in escalating the crackdown on independent media and civil society in Azerbaijan.
At the time of his dismissal, Mehdiyev initially appeared to stay in the good graces of the government, receiving state awards and taking on largely symbolic roles like the president of Azerbaijan’s National Academy of Sciences.
A key moment in his downfall was in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when videos of the extravagant wedding of Mehdiyev’s granddaughter went viral.
There were angry reactions at the time, with many noting the dissonance between Mehdiyev’s wealthy family blatantly violating social distancing regulations while the rest of the country was stuck at home.
Several members of Mehdiyev’s family were fined or received short jail sentences, and Mehdiyev himself was openly mocked and humiliated on state-run television. Members of his clique were then one-by-one removed from power.
The process reflected a sense of ‘vengeance’ that the new elite was determined to inflict on the outgoing intelligentsia, an Azerbaijani analyst told OC Media on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the subject.
Mehdiyev both likely felt disrespected by Aliyev and craved some of the power he had lost, but the notion he may have gone as far as plotting to assassinate Aliyev is probably a bit far-fetched, the analyst added.
What do we know about the ‘coup plan’?
The alleged coup plan fits neatly into an unprecedented collapse of Azerbaijan’s relations with Russia, which appear to have been mended at the same Dushanbe meeting where Putin supposedly warned Aliyev about Mehdiyev’s scheming.
The main initiator of the tension was the deadly Azerbaijan Airlines (AZAL) crash in December 2024, which killed 38 people after crash-landing in Kazakhstan. The plane, which was flying from Baku to Grozny, experienced difficulty with its radar and was then struck by fragments of Russian air-defence missiles after operators mistook the plane for a Ukrainian drone — a thesis that both Azerbaijan and much of the rest of the world accepted shortly after the crash. Putin, however, only explicitly acknowledged Russia’s responsibility during the Dushanbe meeting.
The plane crash figures into different versions of the coup plot.
In Vesti Baku’s more sensational version, Mehdiyev, along with General Najmeddin Sadikov, planned to take out Aliyev as he was flying to a meeting in Saint Petersburg, a trip that coincided almost exactly with the doomed AZAL flight. According to the official version of the events, Aliyev learned about the AZAL crash on his way to Russia and abruptly went back to Azerbaijan.
However, the anonymous source cited by Baku Vesti claimed that the coup plotters mistook the AZAL jet for Aliyev’s plane and targeted it with air-defence missiles.
The source did not specify exactly what happened over the following ten months as Aliyev and other Azerbaijani officials repeatedly pressed Russia to take responsibility for the crash, but said the ‘most dramatic episode’ occurred during the Dushanbe meeting.
Apparently, besides the public apology for the crash, Putin also told Aliyev that Russia had ‘prevented the assassination attempt’, as well as sharing the names of the supposed plotter, assumed to be Mehdiyev.
OC Media has not been able to verify the allegations made by Vesti Baku, and they differ in many key details from the description of the coup plot by APA, the most prominent pro-government media outlet in the country.
In APA’s version of the story, ‘after seizing state power by force, Ramiz Mehdiyev proposed to establish a temporary governing body in the format of a State Council for the transition period’, which he would lead himself.
‘Reportedly, Mehdiyev even shared with Russia the list of individuals who would be represented in the State Council under his leadership’, APA wrote.
It is unclear how Mehdiyev reportedly planned to carry out the coup, or why he never actually attempted to. The claim that the plotters brought down the AZAL jet, thinking it was Aliyev’s plane, was not mentioned.
Nonetheless, the unsuccessful conclusion of the scheme appears to be mostly the same between APA and Vesti Baku.
‘It appears that the 87-year-old Mehdiyev had already exhausted Russia’s patience with his persistent requests and insistence. Consequently, Russia completely abandoned him — seeing no prospects — and officially informed Baku about Mehdiyev’s plan and network’, APA wrote.
Nate Ostiller
