Earlier in the day, head of Rossotrudnichestvo, Yevgeny Primakov, said that pro-Russian blogger Mikael Badalyan had gone missing in the Armenian city of Goris. Later, Sputnik Armenia reported that the blogger was detained together with the agency's columnist Ashot Gevorkyan by the Armenian Investigative Committee. The latter stated that the journalists were arrested as part of an illegal firearms trafficking case.
"We are monitoring the detention of our Sputnik Armenia columnist Ashot Gevorkyan. The detention of a journalist, especially against the background of the first Armenia-Russia media forum, requires a very serious justification. We expects that all procedural norms will be complied with, and that the investigation will be objective and impartial," Rossiya Segodnya international media group, Sputnik's parent company, said in a statement on Thursday.
Possible provocations aimed at undermining the friendship between the peoples of Russia and Armenia should be stopped immediately, the statement read.