Which Mammad offended the cowardly Russian propagandists?

Uralov and his colleagues, mentioned in a press release by the Prosecutor General’s Office of Azerbaijan, have adopted an increasingly confrontational tone when discussing Azerbaijan and its policies. Yet behind the rhetoric, substantive analysis is often difficult to find.

In their narrative, Azerbaijan’s influence extends into almost every sphere of Russian life — from politics and business to the media, the expert community and developments in the North Caucasus. Statements by Russian officials that do not fit their expectations are sometimes presented as evidence of alleged influence from Baku or personal ties to President Ilham Aliyev.

Their predictions about Azerbaijan’s future are particularly striking. They discuss scenarios ranging from political change and internal conflict to territorial fragmentation and even military confrontation. Without concrete evidence or credible expert assessments, such claims look less like serious analysis and more like geopolitical speculation.

There is also a clear contradiction in how Azerbaijanis are portrayed. On one hand, they are described as incapable of effective self-organisation. On the other, they are portrayed as sufficiently coordinated to influence Russian political and business elites. These two claims are difficult to reconcile.

Ilham Aliyev is given similarly outsized importance. In some accounts, he appears capable of simultaneously influencing Russian politics, reshaping the balance of power in the Caucasus, managing the Azerbaijani diaspora and advancing the idea of a broader Turan. Such portrayals may reveal more about the fears and assumptions of their authors than about Azerbaijan’s actual capabilities.

At a broader level, this rhetoric reflects a familiar problem: the difficulty some Russian commentators have in viewing post-Soviet states as independent actors with their own interests and foreign-policy priorities.

This raises a simple question: if Azerbaijan is truly as weak, unstable and dependent as its critics claim, why devote so much attention to its president, its diaspora, its military and the possibility of conflict with it?