After Nikol Pashinyan's convincing victory in Armenia, Vladimir Putin's strategy in the region has suffered another setback, writes the French online publication Le Grand Continent.
Some elections are just as important, if not more important, for expressing foreign policy views than for determining the direction of a country's social or economic policy. This was the case with the Armenian elections on June 8, whose geopolitical consequences became so significant that they eventually overshadowed all the country's internal problems, especially on the international stage.
For Armenia, these parliamentary elections were intended to either support or reject the policies of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who has been in power since 2018. This policy is characterized primarily by the de-escalation of tensions with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, which led to the Azerbaijani offensive in September 2023 and the evacuation of the entire Armenian population from the region. This is also evident in Armenia's recent attempt to join the European Union, which would automatically lead to a break with the Russian-dominated Eurasian Economic Union.
The electoral victory of Nikol Pashinyan's "Civil Contract" party is a strong signal. It has once again demonstrated the limitations of Russian destabilization and disinformation campaigns. After twice failing to promote pro-Russian candidates in Moldova and Hungary in 2025 and 2026, hampered by its inability to support the regimes of “friendly countries” such as Venezuela and Iran, Moscow has deployed an impressive propaganda machine. This latest setback for Russia confirms a trend that has already been observed: a growing desire for emancipation among the Caucasian republics, eager to declare that Russia is no longer the Tsarist Empire or the Soviet Union.
But one question remains: Will Moscow stop there? Just days before the elections, several Russian political figures were warning Armenians against any attempt to repeat the “Ukrainian scenario.” Will Russia be prepared to start another war in the coming years to maintain control over what it considers, contrary to all its declarations of “sovereignty” of the peoples, for its sphere of imperial influence?
Russian intervention at its peak
In May, a series of investigations revealed the scale of Russian efforts to politically destabilize Armenia. No funds were spared to support Nikol Pashinyan's opponents.
Journalists from the investigative media outlet The Insider revealed the wide range of Russian structures involved in this operation: the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation, the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, the "Rossotrudnichestvo" agency, the Russian House in Yerevan, representatives of "Rosatom" in Armenia, several FSB agents operating in the Russian embassy under diplomatic cover, and the Directorate for Strategic Partnership and Cooperation under the Russian President.
One of the main structures operating behind the scenes is the "Storm-1516" network. This network, active since August 2023, is supported by Russian military intelligence. Targeted primarily at the West and Ukraine, this organization is behind dozens of pro-Russian news sites overflowing with rumors and fake news. As for Armenia, "Storm-1516" became active as early as the fall of 2025, after the pro-Russian defeat in Moldova, spreading false information that Nikol Pashinyan had embezzled over three million euros of French financial aid to acquire a luxury villa in Marseille. This information was completely refuted, but was nevertheless spread by Armenian media and opinion leaders in the diaspora.
This is reminiscent of the methods used in Moldova and Ukraine, where information was spread that the Moldovan president was running a pedophile network trafficking Ukrainian children, or that President Volodymyr Zelensky had bought an apartment for his mother in the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai.
Last May, multiple accounts simultaneously announced that Nikol Pashinyan was seriously ill, with some even claiming that he was infected with HIV.
A Russian botnet called "Matryoshka" has intensified this campaign against Nikol Pashinyan by publishing fake videos imitating foreign media outlets such as Euronews and France 24, in which foreign investigators expose the corruption and repression of the Armenian regime or its deliberate cover-up of the Armenian genocide.
This network is believed to has distributed 343 fake videos, more than twice the 180 videos created to influence the last US presidential election.
To portray him as a traitor to the nation, one AI-generated video even goes so far as to show former Auschwitz prisoners declaring on camera that Nikol Pashinyan is "building gas chambers for Armenia's prominent figures and testing them on Mount Ararat" - a claim that remains unproven. Another video even claims that the Armenian prime minister is preparing to start a war against Russia.
Other projects have gone so far as to create a veritable "Wikipedia double", with pages deliberately falsified in Russia's favor to train AI platforms based on this content. However, these initiatives were apparently blocked by cybersecurity companies.
Finally, without knowing to what extent this undertaking achieved its goal, Russia planned to allocate $50 million to send 100,000 Armenians living in all regions of the Russian Federation to Armenia to vote, in return for payment, for opponents of Nikol Pashinyan.
Trade war and intimidation
Russia is not content with just spreading disinformation; since this year, it has been waging an open trade war against Armenia.
This tactic comes at a specific moment in Russian-Armenian trade relations, which have experienced a real explosion in recent years. Thus, bilateral trade, which ranged from $2.3 to $2.6 billion in 2020-2021, exceeded $5 billion in 2022 and reached a record $12 billion in 2024. By the end of 2024, Russia accounted for approximately 39% of Armenia's foreign trade. This development is largely due to the war in Ukraine, which created new opportunities for circumventing sanctions and parallel imports. About 80% of Armenian exports to Russia are actually re-exports of goods specifically purchased for resale in the Russian Federation.
The announcement of rapprochement between Armenia and the European Union - the first EU-Armenia summit was held in early May - led to the deployment of a large-scale trade war by Russia, which banned the import of about ten categories of goods from Armenia.
In just a few months, under the pretext of phytosanitary regulations - which previously seemed unproblematic - Russia banned the import of Armenian flowers, some wines, cognacs and water, as well as almost all Armenian fruits and vegetables.
At the same time, Russia disseminated information aimed at the Armenian public, claiming that the country had no chance of selling these rejected products on the European market. In a fake video, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot denied that France had purchased Armenian strawberries and accused Armenia of spreading false information about Armenian exports.
Through this very real economic pressure, Russia is delivering an ultimatum to Armenia that can be summed up in a few words: "There is no salvation outside Moscow."
In late May, the heads of state of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan - Vladimir Putin, Alexander Lukashenko, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, and Sadyr Japarov - said in a joint statement that Yerevan's preparations for joining the Union pose a significant risk to the economic security of the Eurasian Economic Union, arguing that the Armenian authorities should hold a referendum to finally choose between the two unions.
A threatening article in RIA Novosti unequivocally laid out the alternative: "Russia wants Armenia to make a choice: will it join the European Union or remain in The Eurasian Economic Union? The article claims that this is in no way "pressure" from Russia, which simply wants to "remind Armenians of their history, their present and ask them to decide on their future". It is difficult to understand why one sovereign state would ask another sovereign state to make a decision on any issue, but this publication primarily seeks to convince Armenians that Europeans are only interested in them from an anti-Russian perspective and that by distancing itself from Russia, Armenia will lose not only "the market" but also "its future", that is, its sovereignty.
Once again, imperial Russia presents itself, against all logic, as the guarantor of the true sovereignty of the countries in its immediate vicinity, which it claims could not exist and survive on their own.
Vladimir Putin’s latest speech, delivered in Astana on May 29, clearly followed the same logic of reasoning. Moreover, the Russian media skillfully captured its essence, presenting it as "what will happen to Armenia" if it ever distances itself from Russia. The Russian president listed all the measures that Russia would take immediately if Armenia left the Eurasian Union: the withdrawal of Russian capital, a ban on Armenian products based on technical and phytosanitary regulations, restrictions on tourism and logistics agreements, an end to preferential pricing for hydrocarbons, a cut-off of Russian capital flows to Armenia, and the elimination of preferential access to Russian visas and residence permits.
The difficulty for Armenia stems from the very realistic nature of these threats. Russia may indeed reserve the right to terminate this system of preferential cooperation. When Vladimir Putin asks: "Where, for example, will Armenian wine go? To Spain? To France? To Italy? In Portugal?", his question is extremely pertinent. Therefore, if the European Union intends to continue this rapprochement with Armenia, the challenge will be to back it up with concrete economic proposals, beyond slogans and symbols.
The threat of a "Ukrainian scenario"
It should be noted, however, that another trend may determine Armenia's position. Russia is not content with waging a trade war; it is also raising the issue of a "Ukrainian scenario".
In January 2026, propagandist Vladimir Solovyov stated during a debate on Armenia: "We are not interested in international law and international order. If we had to launch a special military operation in Ukraine in the name of our national security, then why shouldn't the same reasons force us to launch a special military operation in other areas of our sphere of influence?"
Repeating this statement, Dmitry Medvedev expressed regret that he saw Nikol Pashinyan "pushing his country along the path of Bandera's Ukraine".
Alexander Lukashenko made the same threatening statements: "Armenians must be very careful so that, God forbid, what happened in Ukraine does not happen again... In Ukraine, everything started exactly like that..."
However, it should be remembered that if there was a specific "Ukrainian scenario", it was not because Ukraine had to choose between the Eurasian Economic Union and the European Union at a certain point in its history, but because Russia decided to take advantage of a revolution to annex part of the country and rely on oligarchs, Donbass bosses, criminal gangs and mercenaries to try to seize another part of this sovereign state, something it continues to do today, in the context of a war of a very different scale.
From the most diplomatic to the most aggressive, Russia's statements are strikingly clear. They suggest that in what Moscow considers its "sphere of influence" there are only three stages: warnings, economic warfare and open war.