AFP, YEREVAN
As Armenia holds nationwide elections today, experts say Russia has orchestrated an aggressive disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting the country’s prime minister, who has sought closer ties with the EU. 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 neighboring Azerbaijan. In just one week last month, a Russia-linked disinformation campaign spread 31 fake news reports about Armenian 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.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, top, plays the drums a Civil Contract party campaign rally in Yerevan on Friday ahead of today’s general elections.
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.
