As Armenia gears up for elections on Sunday, experts say Russia has orchestrated an aggressive disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting the country’s prime minister, who has sought closer ties with the European Union.
Armenia is formally allied with Moscow, but has built ties with Brussels amid frustration over Russia’s perceived failure to protect it during conflicts with neighbouring Azerbaijan.
In just one week in May, a Russia-linked disinformation campaign spread 31 fake news reports about Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, accusing him of election fraud and of seeking to draw Armenia into a war with Russia, US-based disinformation watchdog NewsGuard said in an article last week.
Some of the fake reports were designed to look like international news outlets, such as France24 and Politico, while others mimicked popular Armenian-based sites Armenpress and CivilNet, NewsGuard reported.
“The fake reports were posted by anonymous X accounts that had few or no prior posts, all within minutes of each other, suggesting a coordinated campaign by inauthentic accounts aligned with Russia,” it said.
One video opened with a real clip from a Euronews report before transitioning into a fabricated segment that falsely claimed Pashinyan was suffering from an “aggressive cancer”. It used AI to mimic a real Euronews presenter’s voice.
NewsGuard said the operations aimed to “bolster the opposition candidate” — billionaire Armenian businessman Samvel Karapetyan, whom Pashinyan has accused of having Russia ties.
Karapetyan — who denies being aligned with Russia — is under house arrest on charges of plotting to overthrow Pashinyan, an allegation his supporters say is politically motivated.
– ‘Complex and large-scale’ –
Western governments have accused Russia of disinformation campaigns before, notably ahead of elections in Moldova and Romania last year, although experts say the scale of the operations this time appear unusually intense.
“Armenia is standing out because of the volume and the number of operations involved. Watching this, it’s every operation, every tactic. It shows everything that Russia is capable of,” said Joseph Bodnar, a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) who co-authored a report on Russian influence.
Efforts to sway the election began early last year, but have grown in scale and intensity in recent months, said Ani Grigoryan, head of the fact-checking unit at Armenian outlet CivilNet.
Among those spreading the false reports is Storm-1516, a propaganda group that French authorities have linked to Russian intelligence, said Grigoryan.
Some fake news stories were “picked up by Armenian outlets because they thought it was from real media,” she said.
Storm-1516 targeted Armenia “more than any other country between April 2025 and April 2026”, according to the ISD.
Armenia’s foreign intelligence service warned in January that influence operations were likely to become “comprehensive, complex and large-scale” ahead of the elections.
Russia has denied seeking to interfere in the vote, accusing Europe of doing the influencing.
“We have seen a sharp intensification of the dragging — a rather strong dragging — of Armenia towards the European Union and NATO structures,” Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman said Thursday.
Opinion polls show Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party firmly ahead.
– ‘I saw it on Facebook’ –
Several experts told AFP that Russia was not the only source of disinformation ahead of the vote, with opposition parties also involved, but that Moscow had shown a particular interest.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly warned Armenia against forging closer ties with Europe, and last week called for the country to hold a referendum on EU membership.
In addition to false claims about Pashinyan, influence operations have aimed to “damage the relationship between Armenia and EU countries, and France in particular,” said Simona N., co-author of the ISD report on Russian influence.
Last month, a video posing as a US-based Armenian diaspora outlet falsely claimed Pashinyan had agreed to take in thousands of migrants expelled by EU countries.
The impact of the disinformation is difficult to assess.
“In the last two, three months we notice that opposition candidates are also starting to disseminate Russian narratives, that’s how Russia gets into Armenia’s info space,” said Grigoryan.
False narratives have meanwhile crept into everyday conversations, said Tatev Hovhannisyan, an Armenian investigative journalist and media literacy educator.
She cited a fake post impersonating the BBC, which claimed that France would send troops to support Pashinyan if he lost.
“I am hearing: ‘it’s true, I saw it on Facebook!’. It’s hard to explain, especially to (the) older generation, that what they are seeing is not true,” she said.
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