Noise without effect: anti-Pashinyan disinformation on the rise ahead of Armenian parliamentary elections

On June 7th, Nikol Pashinyan was reelected Prime Minister of Armenia after long-awaited parliamentary elections. The vote took place against a backdrop of deep geopolitical realignment and made the country a prime target for foreign Information Manipulation Sets (IMSs). 

Ahead of the vote, which attracted nearly 59% of eligible voters in the country, Armenia became a disinformation lab: while some parties used AI in their campaigns according to election observers and journalists, disinformation also came from foreign actors, especially pro-Russian ones, who redoubled their efforts to weaken the candidate who engaged in a political pivot to strengthen ties with the European Union. In May 2026, Vladimir Putin himself warned that Armenia risked following a ‘Ukraine scenario’ should it continue deepening ties with Brussels.

Our latest investigation documents operations targeting Nikol Pashinyan: as most of them came from content disseminated by IMS such as Overload, Pravda and Storm-1516, we could also gather evidence of the role played by diaspora accounts on spreading disinformation. With the help of in-house tools including CrossOver Monitoring, we documented the various ways in which Pashinyan was targeted online, on social media and on messaging apps Telegram and Max. 

TikTok, Pravda network, and the re-use of fake news sites targeting previous French elections

As French Armenians form one of the most significant diaspora communities, we concentrated our efforts on monitoring claims that were disseminated in French online spaces. We found that French users of TikTok would be confronted with content mostly hostile to Pashinyan when searching his name, with AI-generated content alongside regular videos originating from accounts linked to the Kremlin, the Armenian diaspora, and sometimes from Azerbaijan. 

The narratives we found on TikTok were echoing those we came across in Overload emails and in French articles written for the Pravda network. Among the 72 Storm-1516 sites we identified, 56 had also reposted narratives targeting Prime Minister Pashinyan and pushing pro-Russian narratives. Seventeen domain names also harboured Storm-1516 sites that previously targeted France local elections. 

Although we noticed the constant attempts to interfere in the Armenian parliamentary elections, the election results suggest their impact remained limited: a pattern consistent with what was observed in Moldova’s 2024 presidential election, where sustained Russian information manipulation ultimately failed to prevent a pro-European outcome. The operations may be firing blanks at the ballot box, but the infrastructure behind them remains active.