Ilham Aliyev pardons blogger Alexander Lapshin

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev signed an order to pardon Israeli citizen Alexander Lapshin Sept. 11, Trend reports.

According to the order, 41-year-old Lapshin, who has been sentenced to three years in prison upon the Baku Grave Crimes Court’s decision dated July 20, 2017, is to be released.

The order comes into force from the date of signing.

In an interview with a correspondent of Vestnik Kavkaza, the chairman of the Izborsk club, Alexander Prokhanov, stressed that remission of the Russian blogger is an act of Baku’s goodwill aimed at strengthening the Russian-Azerbaijani relations. "Apparently, such a pardon is not accidental - it is a confirmation of a desire for closest and quickest rapprochement with Russia. President Aliev spoke about it during our meeting, and I welcome this in every possible way, because any remission and release of a person from prison is a great happiness ", he said.

Alexander Prokhanov associated the event with the upcoming conference ‘The Moscow-Baku Axis: Towards a New Geopolitics of the Caucasus’, which will be held this Thursday in the Moscow President Hotel under the auspices of the Center for Geopolitical Expertise and the Izborsk Club. "This is a very important and representative meeting of Russian and Azerbaijani intellectuals, a sort of assembly where the rapprochement of the Russian and Azerbaijani factors will be manifested.  The prominent representatives of our patriotic movement, inhabitants of Baku and representatives of the Moscow Azerbaijani community will participate in the event. And the main factor here is a desire for rapprochement between Azerbaijan and Russia. I think, the pardon took place on the eve of this meeting, "the writer said.

The head of the expert council Baku Network, Elkhan Aleskerov, called the remission of the Russian blogger an act corresponding to the level of allied relations between Russia and Azerbaijan. "A big role in Lapshin’s ( who is a citizen of three countries) remission was played by his Russian citizenship. I recall that, despite his support of the occupiers of Nagorno-Karabakh and other territories of Azerbaijan and sharing of his views in the blog, he was convicted for illegal crossing the border with  the Ukrainian passport, where his name was written differently. His remission is another element of Azerbaijan's goodwill towards Russia, as neither Ukraine nor Israel was interested in his fate to the same extent as Russia. Our level of relations allow us to make such things, "- he stressed.