A Baku court sentenced Russian travel blogger Alexander Lapshin to three years behind bars for having journeyed to the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, APA news agency reported on July 20. Lapshin was detained earlier this year in Minsk, Belarus. He was then deported to Azerbaijan, where he was tried for illegally crossing the border of Azerbaijan and making public appeals against the state, allegedly for advocating for the independence of the contested region. The prosecutor had demanded a sentence of six-and-a-half years for the blogger.

Nagorno-Karabakh has been an apple of discord between Azerbaijan and Armenia ever since the region voted in a referendum to join the latter in the late 1980s. The two countries fought a bitter war over the region after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which ended in a ceasefire, but no resolution to the conflict.

Azerbaijan has been blacklisting foreigners that travel to the region, but Lapshin's arrest in a third country was the first time the government sought retribution against a foreign national. It is believed that Baku was looking to make an example out of Lapshin's case, in order to detract others from travelling to the region or advocating for its independence.

Lapshin pleaded "not guilty" and said that his trips to the region in 2011-2012 were not conducted in conjunction with Armenian authorities or against Azerbaijan. The verdict came just as Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev celebrated freedom of speech and the media by allocating funds for the construction of apartment buildings for journalists and giving a speech in which he called journalists "his assistants", according to APA news agency.