Azerbaijan is outraged that the Russian state news agency TASS has named the city of Khankendi, a city in Nagorno-Karabakh, Stepanakert in its article, after the Bolshevik Stepan Shaumyan. Azerbaijani state media is already threatening to return “historical names” to cities in the Russian Federation.
Baku’s position on this was described by the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The day before, on 31 July, TASS published news about the demolition of a monument to the artist Ivan Aivazovsky in the city of Khankendi, which was the capital of the unrecognized “Nagorno-Karabakh Republic,” which ceased to exist in September 2023.
In the headline and text of the news, Russian propagandists called the city by its Armenian name, Stepanakert, in honour of the Armenian Bolshevik Stepan Shaumyan. Baku called this “a sign of disrespect for the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan” and “an unfriendly step.”
They stated that Stepan Shaumyan, after whom Khankendi was renamed in 1923, “together with the Dashnaks, committed massacres against the Azerbaijani people.” This very renaming was, they said, “an act of contempt for Azerbaijan.”
So now Azerbaijan expects Russian official bodies to “stop distorting Azerbaijani toponyms and using names that were used by the separatist quasi-regime.”
In the event of a recurrence of such incidents, Baku reserves the right to “start using the historical names of many settlements” in Russia.
The Azerbaijani state agency AZԵRTAC has also already written that in the absence of reciprocity from TASS, Kaliningrad will begin to be called Königsberg, Orenburg – Orinbor, Volgograd – Sarisa, Grozny – Solzha-Gala, Novorossiysk – Sudzhuk-Sudzhuk, Yuzhno-Kurilsk – Furukamappa, Petrozavodsk – Petroskoi, Izhevsk – Izhkar, and the Volga River – Itil.
“We expect an apology from the TASS agency and appropriate changes to the publication. Otherwise, under current legislation, appropriate restrictive measures will be considered regarding the activities of TASS in Azerbaijan,” the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry added.
As of 1 August, the name “Stepanakert” was removed from the headline of the TASS news story. The correct name, Khankendi, also appeared in the text of the news story, although “Stepanakert” was also left in.
Now the propaganda agency’s sentence reads as follows: “The Armenian public organisation, ‘Agency for the Development of Tourism and Culture of Karabakh’, reported the demolition by the new regional authorities in Khankend of the monument to Ivan Aivazovsky, erected in Stepanakert in 2021. “
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