France’s Foreign Ministry said that Azerbaijan’s decision to release French national Martin Ryan “marks a step towards the normalisation of relations” between Azerbaijan and France, following decades of deep tensions between the two countries.
In a short statement released on Thursday through the French embassy in Baku, the day after pardoned Ryan left for Paris, as part of a wider deal to remove Uzbek-Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov from the EU’s Russia sanctions list, the French foreign ministry said that “the decision (to pardon Ryan) is the result of a patient and demanding dialogue with Azerbaijan’s authorities which we intend to continue.”
Against the backdrop of deeply fraught relations between France and Azerbaijan, French businessman Martin Ryan was arrested in December 2023 and later sentenced to 10 years in prison on espionage charges.
France challenged the Azerbaijani proceedings, considering them arbitrary and based on an unfair trial.
Last week, Euronews reported that as part of an effort by several Turkic countries lobbying the EU to secure the Uzbek-Russian oligarch’s delisting from the EU’s Russia sanctions list, Paris pushed to remove Usmanov from the list in connection with Azerbaijan being asked to release Ryan and another French national.
France succeeded in its push to remove Usmanov from the EU sanctions list on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev signed a decree pardoning Ryan, among others, and the French national left Baku shortly after.
Thursday’s French statement does not make any reference to the Usmanov case, but it describes a “patient and demanding dialogue” and calls Ryan’s presidential pardon a “humanitarian gesture which French salutes.”
The apparent diplomatic, possibly historic breakthrough towards what Paris now calls “a step towards normalisation” between France and Azerbaijan coincides with the unfolding peace and reconciliation process between Armenia and Azerbaijan after decades of war over Karabakh.
France has been one of Armenia’s staunchest supporters for many decades.
At the same time, France’s announcement comes amid a wider political and economic process of the EU strengthening relations with the South Caucasus and Central Asian countries amid the fast-moving geopolitical evolutions around Eurasia and beyond.