Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has detained a man — believed to be an Azerbaijani national — alleging he had been recruited by Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) to smuggle classified military documents to Kyiv.
The FSB said the man was detained at the Yarag–Kazmalyar road checkpoint on Daghestan’s border with Azerbaijan.
According to the FSB, the detainee, identified as Yadulla Rufullaev, born in 1989, was a citizen of a ‘foreign state’, with Azerbaijani sources saying he was an Azerbaijani national. The FSB has accused him of transporting service materials stolen ‘as a result of an attack on a bearer of classified military information’, with the intention of passing them to Ukraine.
The detainee allegedly confessed that he acted on the instructions of his elder brother, Sabukhi Rufullaev, born in 1981, who lives in Ukraine and is described as an ‘SBU agent’. Yadulla Rufullaev reportedly said he collected the documents and a mobile phone from a cache in Russia’s southern Kurgan region before attempting to deliver them to Ukraine.
He is being charged with providing assistance to the enemy, which carries a maximum prison sentence of 15 years. The FSB stated that they had begun operational and investigative measures to establish all those involved, including the organisers of the plot.
Footage of the arrest, released by Russian media, shows the detainee to be a lorry driver. Items confiscated from him included a tablet, a SIM card, a mobile phone, and flash drives.
The detention took place against the backdrop of rising tensions in Azerbaijan–Russia relations, following the deaths of two Azerbaijani brothers in Russian police custody in June. Russia has claimed one died of natural causes and declined to comment on the other, and said they were suspected of murders in the early 2000s. Azerbaijan has presented forensic evidence to support their allegations the two were tortured to death.
The initial spark of the current downturn in relations between Moscow and Baku was the Azerbaijan Airlines plane crash in Kazakhstan in December 2024, while flying from Baku to Grozny, killing 38 people. Azerbaijan has blamed the incident on Russian air defence that mistakenly targeted the plane.
Following the deaths of the two brothers, both countries engaged in a series of apparent tit-for-tat arrests, with Azerbaijani authorities blocking the operation of Sputnik Azerbaijan in Baku and detaining seven employees of the Russian-state news outlet. Shortly afterwards, Azerbaijani security services arrested ten other Russian nationals, accusing them of drug trafficking and cybercrimes. At the same time, Russia has continued to arrest high-profile figures of the Azerbaijani diaspora.
On Wednesday, a Russian court sentenced Azerbaijani-born Mehriban Lukinskaya to five years in prison on charges of confidential cooperation with a foreign state. Lukinskaya, 55, was born in Baku but had resided in Russia for some time. Details of the case remain classified. Lukinskaya worked at a pipe plant in Ryazan between 2017 and 2021, and in 2019, she founded a company called Vertikal, which officially traded in building materials. The company has since been liquidated.
Nate Ostiller
