Russian police briefly detained three members of the unregistered The Other Russia of E. V. Limonov after they held a protest near Azerbaijan’s consulate in Saint Petersburg.
The Other Russia of E.V. Limonov is an unregistered party founded in 2010 by Eduard Limonov. According to the Counter Extremism Project, the party subscribes to National Bolshevism and promotes the occupation of territories inhabited by Russian speakers in post-Soviet countries. The group has also been sending fighters to fight against Ukraine since 2014.
The small protest was held on Wednesday by Gleb Yezhov, Danil Shmalko, and Ivan Gubin under the slogan ‘Aliyev, don’t anger Russia’, with demonstrators focusing on the recent deterioration of Azerbaijan–Russia relations.
During the protest, the three demonstrators read out their manifesto, which alleged that Aliyev was a ‘tender friend’ to the ‘criminal Kyiv regime’.
‘[Aliyev] approves of the war with Russia. The other day he congratulated the bloody clown [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyi on [Ukraine’s] Independence Day’, the manifesto read.
The protesters also highlighted the recent closing of the Russian House in Baku as well as the detention of seven employees of the Russian state news outlet Sputnik Azerbaijan.
‘Aliyev closed the Russian House in Baku, throws Russian journalists into prison, and shuts the mouths of those who want to be friends with our country’, the manifesto read.
‘At the same time, Baku receives huge amounts of money from the diaspora; hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis live and earn money here, and there are plenty of them on the list of billionaires’.
‘Aliyev thinks that it is possible to feed off Russia and simultaneously make trouble for it? It won't work!’, the protesters alleged.
As part of their manifesto, they demanded that the Azerbaijani authorities stop supporting Ukraine, release the ‘political prisoners’, and re-open the Russian House, while also not meddling in Russia’s cultural and educational activities.
After reading the manifesto, police arrested the three protesters. They were later all released.
This is not the first protest the group has held near the Azerbaijani Consulate.
In July, party activists held a picket focusing on Baku’s alleged anti-Russian policy. As a result, four of the party members were detained.
The initial spark of the current downturn in relations between Moscow and Baku was the Azerbaijan Airlines plane crash in Kazakhstan in December 2024, which killed 38 people after being diverted from its destination, Grozny, to Kazakhstan’s Aktau. Azerbaijan has blamed the incident on Russian air defence that mistakenly targeted the plane.
Aytan Farhadova
In June, tensions further flared after the deaths of two Azerbaijani brothers in Russian police custody. 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.
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.
Nate Ostiller
