Can the West undo Russia’s malign campaign in Armenia?

Often-overlooked developments in Armenia show how Western policymakers are failing to recognise and counteract the growing sophistication of Russia’s propaganda machine, writes David Grigorian.

David Grigorian is a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a former official of the IMF and the World Bank.

In this era of hybrid warfare, Russia has built a formidable arsenal of tools and methods to influence public opinion and politics. Disinformation, playing on contradictions, reverse psychology, and flip-flopping are deployed to confuse the audience and allow Russian propagandists to gain ever-tighter control over the narratives they build.

Meanwhile, Western policymakers have largely failed to recognise these Russian advances let alone counteract them. Nowhere has this failure been so pronounced as in the context of Armenia.

Russian companies’ absolute control of Armenia’s economy—energy, telecommunications, mining, infrastructure, and finance—has provided the Kremlin with almost unlimited influence over Armenia’s domestic and foreign policies.

In 2018, Russians needed to replace a formerly loyal ally in Yerevan, President Serge Sargsyan, after he refused to deliver Nagorno-Karabakh (or Artsakh in Armenian) to Azerbaijan under the so-called Lavrov Plan. The Russians wanted someone willing to give up Artsakh and chose Nikol Pashinyan, a young opposition newspaper editor and college dropout with a thirst for power.

The Kremlin needed an excuse to betray its treaty ally, Armenia, in favour of a newfound business partner, Azerbaijan, which has purchased billions of dollars worth of advanced weaponry and took part in a massive money laundering operation known as the Russian Laundromat. A narrative that Armenia has gone down the road of a “colour revolution” was a perfect cover for such a switch.

There is evidence that Pashinyan met with Sergey Naryshkin, the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), in Moscow as far back as 2015. Two years later, after a failed attempt to hijack a large anti-government rebellion in July 2016, Pashinyan sparked a protest movement in April 2018 and effectively took over from the ruling party within a few weeks.

This was done virtually unchallenged by an otherwise heavy-handed Sargsyan administration in a cleanly orchestrated play, with the support of thousands of protesters, including from giant Russian-owned companies, and neutral posturing from the Kremlin. Interestingly enough, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on Facebook: “Armenia, Russia is always with you,” after the news broke of Serge Sargsyan’s resignation.

However, once he took power, a massive smear campaign was launched to portray Pashinyan and his team as “globalists,” frequently calling them “Sorosyata,” a pejorative “for children of George Soros” in Russian. While these claims were false, they were widely accepted as accurate, mainly because many Armenians longed for change. In a private conversation, a former senior US intelligence official with intimate knowledge of Russia called this “an act from the KGB’s standard playbook.”

However, when Pashinyan effectively handed over Artsakh to Azerbaijan on November 9, 2020, Vladimir Putin and all Russian propagandists went out of their way to support Pashinyan, fearing public outrage in Armenia that threatened to take him down. When the war was over, Sergei Shoigu, then Russia’s Defense Minister, called it a “successful operation,” a top Russian ideologue, Alexander Dugin, said: “We helped Azerbaijan to return Karabakh. … We have fulfilled our task.”

Later, it became clear that Russia needed to secure the loyalty of Azerbaijan and Turkey during its invasion of Ukraine. The price of that loyalty was Artsakh. Putin signed the Treaty of Strategic Partnership with Azerbaijan two days before invading Ukraine.

To date, Pashinyan’s ties to Russia continue to be strong. He recently chaired the Eurasian Union Summit in Moscow in May 2024, had numerous personal meetings with Putin, and maintains Armenia’s membership in the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation, among other glaring signs of deep ongoing partnership. Contrary to the pundits’ claims, Pashinyan has done nothing to challenge Russia’s grip on Armenia in any meaningful and irreversible way.

How to limit Russia’s (soft) power in the region?

Although Western policymakers have not adequately countered Russian efforts and may have indirectly aided Russia’s efforts to control the narrative in Armenia, not all is lost. The Kremlin’s actions—however successful—could be countered with the following set of measures.

First, Western intelligence agencies must share more information about Russian influence operations in Russia’s near abroad. Although doing so preemptively (Ukraine is an example) would be more effective in curbing Russia’s malign activity, doing it ex-post, too, may have significant implications. Such interventions are important as they can give people a voice against autocratic regimes supported by Russia, which have the will and ability to crush public dissent, as they are doing in Georgia, where Western support came too little, too late.

Second, Western media outlets could be more nuanced about what is happening in the former Soviet republics. The quality of news coverage of those countries is shockingly low (Ukraine is an exception), with most commentators being too lazy to go into specifics and instead choosing to peddle the established narratives, which are increasingly under Russian control.

Third, and related to this, more nuance is needed across all developmental and geopolitical policy prescriptions offered to countries like Armenia. Lack thereof could reduce the credibility of Western countries and hurt their reputation as reliable partners. In the Armenian context, the main blunder relates to the conflict settlement with Azerbaijan.

Finally, Washington and Brussels must work closely with pro-Western opposition parties in post-Soviet countries. This partnership should help build capacity and expand their influence in an environment where they otherwise do not stand a chance against much better-resourced pro-Russian parties. Based on my monitoring of the situation in Armenia, much more needs to be done to support these opposition parties.