An Unlikely Armenian-Azerbaijani Love Story Ends In Russian Terror Attack

One image has been shared again and again on social media in the Caucasus since last week’s deadly terrorist attack at a Moscow concert hall: a photo of a handsome young couple dressed up and pulled in tight to each other at a white-tablecloth event.

Lilit Israelian, whose long, black hair is falling in ringlets over a flower-print dress to frame a delicate smile, was Armenian. Her husband, Vugar Huseynov, with short-cropped black hair and an assured smile to match his black-tie attire, was ethnic Azerbaijani. They were among the victims of the March 22 attack.

To many in the Caucasus, the tragedy of their murders was compounded by the improbability of a match that spans the deep ethnic divide stemming from a decades-long conflict.

“To be an Armenian and an Azerbaijani and face all that resistance, fall in love and get married, it’s so rare to see,” one person wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Then three or four terrorists come and take their lives like nothing. My God, give them the most beautiful corner of heaven.”

Huseynov and Israelian both worked at Moscow’s Vnukovo International Airport; the aviation services firm UTG reported that Huseynov was a current employee and that Israelian had previously worked for the company. Israelian’s family told Russian media that they had a 1 1/2-year-old child.

Little has been reported about the background of the couple’s story, but it is safe to say that they must have faced strong resistance from their respective communities.

In a 2009 survey, 92 percent of Armenians said they would disapprove of an Armenian woman marrying an Azerbaijani man. The corresponding figure among Azerbaijanis about Armenians was 99 percent.

In Soviet times, marriages between Armenians and Azerbaijanis were a more regular occurrence in places with large mixed populations like Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, where ethnic Armenians composed between 10 and 20 percent of residents. Mixed marriages were “an icon of Bakuvian cosmopolitanism,” wrote Laurence Broers, associate fellow at the London-based Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia Program.

But when the conflict over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh blew up as the Soviet Union collapsed, that era of coexistence in Armenia and Azerbaijan came to an end. Virtually all ethnic Armenians fled Azerbaijan — or were driven out — and vice versa; the very few who remained were typically people in mixed marriages or their children and who in many cases kept that aspect of their lives under wraps.

In places where Armenians and Azerbaijanis have continued to live as neighbors, like Georgia or Russia, mixed marriages still occur but are exceedingly rare. Russia doesn’t keep data on marriages by ethnicity, making it impossible to know how many Armenian-Azerbaijan pairs there are.

“I am half Armenian and half Azerbaijani myself and proud of it. This is so heartbreaking,” one Reddit user wrote in a thread about the couple’s death. “There are very few couples like this left. What a cruel world. May they rest in peace and may their kid grow up knowing that his mom and dad’s love defied cultural boundaries to create him. I hope their kid grows up healthy, strong, and proud of his roots.”

Aside from his rare family story, Huseynov also distinguished himself by his selfless bravery during the attack. Video by eyewitnesses captured him trying to use overturned tables to shield his wife and other victims and slow the attackers.

“Colleagues spoke of Vugar as capable and kind,” wrote the Russian Telegram channel Mash, which was the first to report on the identities of Huseynov and Israelian.

As news spread about the couple’s tragic fate alongside at least 139 other dead victims, among the grieving reactions there were inevitably cruel comments reflecting an entrenched rivalry fueled by repeated wars and ethnic violence since the 1990s.

“He got married to an Armenian and karma caught up with him,” one commenter on an Azerbaijani Telegram page wrote.

“How did they give their daughter to a Turk? Are they also Azeri?” a commenter on an Armenian page wrote, employing what is many Armenian nationalists’ shorthand for Azerbaijanis, who have close linguistic and historical ties to Turks.

But comments like that were quickly reproached and voted down.

“Let their memory make peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan. No more wars in the 21st century,” wrote one Twitter user.