BAKU, Azerbaijan — A court in Azerbaijan on Thursday sentenced a Russian blogger to three years in prison for illegally crossing the border after he traveled to a separatist-controlled region of the country.
Alexander Lapshin was detained by police in Belarus last year and extradited to Azerbaijan, where authorities filed charges against him over his trip to Nagorno-Karabakh through Armenia several years ago. The blogger’s extradition from Belarus came during a rift between Russia and Belarus, making the Lapshin case a highly politicized matter.
Nagorno-Karabakh is officially part of Azerbaijan. Since a separatist war ended in 1994, it has been under the control of forces that claim to be local ethnic Armenians but that Azerbaijan says include many Armenian troops.
The judge at the court in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, on Thursday convicted Lapshin of illegally crossing the border but found him innocent of “public calls against the state,” a second charge he faced.