Aleksandr Lapshin

Aleksandr Lapshin was born in 1976 in Yekaterinburg

Lapshin was born in 1976 in Sverdlovsk, now Yekaterinburg, to a Russian father and a Jewish mother. At 13 he moved to Israel with his family. He holds Ukrainian and Russian citizenship.

He studied at the University of Haifa and later spent about a year studying in the United States. After his studies he served 3 years in the IDF.

From 2003 to 2008 he lived in Moscow and worked in commercial real estate and the Forex market. After the 2008 financial crisis he left Moscow. Until 2016 he worked as a remote editor for Russian travel websites.

He visited Nagorno-Karabakh in 2011 and 2012, and Azerbaijan blacklisted him. In December 2016 he was arrested in Minsk, and in February 2017 Belarus extradited him to Azerbaijan, where a court sentenced him to 3 years in prison. Russia and Israel tried to stop the extradition, and Armenia protested it.

In September 2017 he was attacked in his cell in Baku. Azerbaijani officials said he had tried to take his life, which he denied. President Ilham Aliyev pardoned him and he was flown to Israel. In 2021 the European Court of Human Rights found Azerbaijan responsible for his illegal arrest, torture and attempted murder, and in 2022 the UN Human Rights Committee found Belarus responsible for his illegal arrest and extradition.