The Azerbaijani Ministry of Foreign Affairs strongly condemned New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani's statement, calling it provocative and a distortion of historical facts. Speaking on the anniversary of the 1915 events, Mamdani linked the killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire to modern-day events, accusing Azerbaijan and Turkey of attacking Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020 and "expelling" more than 100,000 people in 2023.
The mother of Kevin Leake, who was sentenced to four years in prison last December, has been unable to locate him. At the beginning of the month, her son was transferred from the Krasnodar pre-trial detention center. The woman contacted the pre-trial detention center on the way to Saratov and Kirov, but she was unable to obtain information about her son’s whereabouts.
In December 2023, Kevin Leake was sentenced to four years in prison. According to security officials, the young man was filming a military unit in Maykop and sending photographs by email to “representatives of a foreign state.” The investigation claimed that the defendant’s actions were caused by “disagreement with the political course” of the Russian authorities and the start of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Kevin Leake is a prize-winner of various Olympiads. He was born in Germany and lived there until 2017, and then moved to Russia with his mother Victoria. In February 2023, the Leakes prepared to return to Germany. Before this, Victoria decided to remove her son from the military register, but she was placed under administrative arrest on trumped-up charges. After their release, they tried to leave again, but on the day of departure, security forces detained Kevin. He was searched, then he was taken away for interrogation and accused of treason.