Azerbaijan pardons French prisoner after EU caves in on sanctions

Editor's note: this is a developing story

Azerbaijan's leader Ilham Aliyev pardoned a French national on Sept. 23 reports France 24, hours after the EU agreed to delist two Russian oligarchs from sanctions.

The EU was forced by French pressure to drop sanctions against oligarchs Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman on Sept. 22, in return for allowing the bloc's remaining 3,000 Russia sanctions to remain in force.

The French government has not publicly cited why it adopted this position, and only citing a "national security" situation around the table with EU ambassadors.

The Financial Times first reported it was linked to Azerbaijan's holding prisoner two people of French nationality.

Those two names were suspected of being Martin Ryan and Anass Derraz, since three weeks before, the French lawmaker Marc Pena enquired what France was doing to secure their release in a French parliamentary question.

Aliyev's pardoning of Martin Ryan goes some way to confirming that suspicion.

Who are the prisoners?

Martin Ryan was running a food import business in Azerbaijan when Baku arrested him in December 2023.

Baku accused him of spying for France, before sentencing him to ten years in prison.

Paris rejected the accusation and denounced the ruling in a July 2026 press statement.

The French-language media Brut reported in 2025 that Ryan "expressed regret by saying he had acted without being aware that his activities could be used for espionage purposes," during a hearing.

Months before his arrest, Ryan wrote to the lawmaker responsible for French people living abroad to criticize her for her positions on Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijani state news agency Azertag reported.

Azerbaijan is ranked at the bottom of the free presses index, ranking 171 out of 180 countries monitored by the media NGO Reporters Without Borders.

The second prisoner invites more speculation.

Derraz was sentenced by Azerbaijan to 12 years in prison, later reduced to nine, on charges of accepting bribes from the Russian-Azerbaijani oligarch Farkhad Akhmedov.

Pro-government media in Azerbaijan accuse him and another man, Alexandre Benalla, of being bribed by Akhmedov in 2018, in return for securing the release of his impounded luxury yacht “Luna.”

Akhmedov had been sanctioned by the EU and the U.K., but the British dropped their sanctions listing in March 2025, and the Financial Times reported that the EU removed Akhmedov without giving a justification.

The EU's sanctions listing described him as a "Russian businessman involved in the energy sector and in Russian local politics."

"He is close to the Kremlin and is a leading businessperson involved in economic sectors providing a substantial source of revenue" to Russia, the listing reads.

And the other man identified by Azerbaijan in the alleged bribery, Benalla, has been the subject of multiple scandals in France.

Benalla worked as a security guard for Emmanuel Macron since he first ran for President of France and had exclusive access to him, including being one of a few invited to go skiing with the new president back in 2017.

He has a "Benalla affair" Wikipedia page which summarises three separate scandals reported by the French press.

The third of those scandals, first reported by French investigative media Mediapart in February 2019, detailed how Benalla drew up security contracts with two Russian oligarchs totalling 2.2 million euros ($2.5 million).

The two oligarchs were the aforementioned Akhmedov, and the Uzbek-Russian oligarch Iskandar Makhmudov, BFM TV reported.

Makhmudov is not sanctioned by the EU, and Bulgarian news agency BTA reported in August that Sofia had requested he be removed from the EU's 21st sanctions package, adopted in July 2026.

Makhmudov, along with Akhmedov, Usmanov, and Fridman, all feature in investigative reporting exposing their role in helping Russia prosecute its war against Ukraine.