Armenia’s Election: A Win for Pashinyan, Yet the Kremlin Long Game Persists

Armenia’s 7 June parliamentary elections were widely viewed as a test of Russia's influence in the South Caucasus. In the run-up, Moscow deployed a similar interference strategy as it has with other former Soviet states, combining diplomatic, economic and informational pressure to boost support for pro-Russia candidates while discrediting the pro-European incumbent, Nikol Pashinyan.

While Pashinyan’s party, Civil Contract, retained a parliamentary majority, the loss of its constitutional majority will pose challenges for his third term. Meanwhile, analysts have pointed to a long-term and sustained campaign of Russian hybrid electoral interference for at least a year prior to the election. This campaign coincided with pro-Russian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan and his Strong Armenia party (established in 2025) polling second, with twice as many seats as pollsters predicted.

Establishing causality when assessing influence campaigns is challenging. Yet there is a realistic possibility that Russia’s hybrid interference campaign contributed to this outcome, and that Russia’s efforts may yet serve the Kremlin’s strategic objectives in the long term.

The Context for Electoral Interference

Following what many Armenians perceive as Russian betrayal during the 2020 Second Karabakh War and the subsequent withdrawal of Russian peacekeepers from the region in 2023, Pashinyan has pursued a careful strategy of peeling back Armenia’s layers of dependency without triggering a direct confrontation with Moscow. Since 2022, Yerevan has frozen its participation in the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), signalled its intention to seek EU membership and deepened cooperation with Western partners on security and reforms.

Moscow has responded by weaponizing existing points of leverage. Russia still accounts for a large share of Armenia’s trade and energy supplies and has used this position to punish Yerevan’s Western turn by restricting imports of high-value agricultural goods and threatening to rip up duty-free gas arrangements.

The Russian-dominated Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) has also been used to threaten Armenia with economic consequences of deeper engagement with the EU, signalling that this path will trigger economic crisis. On 9 May 2026, President Putin publicly warned Armenia would risk ending up with a ‘Ukrainian scenario’ if it pursued European integration and demanded a referendum that would allow Armenians to choose between EAEU and the EU. These messages were reiterated at the recent EAEU summit in Astana where the Presidents of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan urged Armenia to hold a referendum on EU membership.

In Armenia, the Kremlin does not rely on a single proxy, it rather tries to instrumentalise different sources to obtain a veto in strategic decision-making. Political and financial support for pro-Russian parties and politicians and the cultivation of elites around figures such as Karapetyan and Robert Kocharyan serve the Kremlin’s long-term strategy to embed a pro-Kremlin constituency within the system.

Assessing the Russian Hybrid Campaign

The Kremlin’s hybrid electoral interference campaign has not secured a victory for Karapetyan, but it may still have successfully served Moscow’s broader aims.

In April this year, Vedemosti, a Russian newspaper, reported on the Kremlin’s interference effort ahead of the Armenian elections. Sources close to the Presidential Administration reportedly told the paper that the objective was not necessarily to prevent Pashinyan from winning, but rather to re-establish a pro-Russian political bloc in Armenia, reversing the ‘uncomfortable’ situation where there was no one to ‘speak for’ Russia in the country.

In this context, Pashinyan’s electoral win is less than the resounding victory that European commentators have presented it as. Firstly, the election resulted in a 23.2% share of the vote for Karapetyan’s party, doubling pollsters’ predictions. Secondly, while Civil Contract came out top with a 49.85% share of the vote, they lost 7 seats, leaving them 6 shy of a constitutional majority.

This matters for Pashinyan’s regional normalisation agenda and the conclusion of a peace deal with Azerbaijan. Baku has stated that further progress is contingent on Armenia relinquishing its constitutional claims to Nagorno-Karabakh. However, without a constitutional majority, Pashinyan will face barriers in achieving this, undermining his ambition for EU integration, his self-curated image as a peacemaker, and risking an eventual return to hostilities with Azerbaijan. Meanwhile, a strong pro-Russian minority in parliament could impede the government’s cautious security-led pivot from Moscow and delay Pashinyan's ambitious economic diversification agenda through connectivity projects such as the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity.

Russian Information Operations to Undermine Pashinyan’s Popularity

While European commentators have celebrated Pashinyan’s win as evidence of a ‘cemented’ turn away from Russia, the Russian press has instead focused on Pashinyan’s weakened mandate and accusations of electoral violations (which independent monitoring missions do not corroborate).

This narrative flip chimes with Moscow’s information operations in the months leading up to the election, which sought to undermine Pashinyan’s candidacy through accusations of criminality, corruption and Western puppetry.

Narrative intelligence shared with RUSI by LetsData, a Ukrainian start-up specialising in the early detection of emerging threats online, highlights the prominence of narratives centred on Western interference to Russia-linked information operations targeting Armenian voters.

LetsData analysts - using narrative intelligence system Vantage - monitored the output of a set of online accounts and pages assessed to be ‘malign’ and Kremlin-linked, based on behavioural, content-based and other indicators. They found that narratives alleging EU or Western interference in the Armenian elections made up an impactful subset of the content posted by these ‘malign’ networks, totalling almost 1000 posts or articles in the two months immediately prior to the election and accumulating 4,668,899 views and 28,897 reactions.

LetsData analysts consider this cluster of posts and articles to be a coordinated information operation which sought to delegitimise Pashinyan by framing his political survival as dependent on Western interference, while casting interference as a threat to Armenian sovereignty.

As in Moldova and Romania, Russian information operations leveraged an array of overt and covert channels. The Vantage platform surfaced that across all narrative strands, content produced by Russian state-aligned channels was subsequently shared and redistributed by a web of pro-Kremlin networks across Telegram, TikTok and YouTube. These tactics – and the use of known entities such as the Social Design Agency – are similar to previous Kremlin efforts in Moldova and elsewhere.

One striking difference of this campaign, however, is the timeline. Analysts from the ISD and NewsGuard have highlighted that Russia’s campaign in Armenia began in April 2025, seven months earlier than comparable efforts targeting Moldova. This suggests that Moscow is evolving and adapting its tactics, perhaps opting for a more sustained influence campaign with the objective of shaping political outcomes in the longer term.

What Does This Tell Us About Russia’s Playbook?

Armenia’s election should be read less as a Russian failure than as the latest iteration of a playbook under revision. While Russia’s campaign fell short of the most obvious objective – an electoral win for Karapetyan – it has seeded narratives of illegitimacy in the Armenian information environment and may have contributed to the establishment of a durable pro-Russian opposition bloc in Armenian politics.

The Armenia case study demonstrates that the Kremlin certainly views elections as opportunities to translate hybrid influence into political outcomes, but much of the groundwork for this interference is laid well before citizens head to the polls, and political impacts can persist even when electoral victories are not secured.

There are important lessons for the UK and Europe. Russia’s playbook is exportable, and the tactics tested and honed in Romania, Moldova and Armenia could be deployable to Western European democracies too. The Armenian example signals the need for a dedicated national capability to counter foreign interference and protect information integrity not just during, but outside of electoral periods. This is necessary to safeguard public debate, trust and party politics from chronic interference which operates on timelines longer than electoral campaigns.

LetsData is a Ukrainian founded AI company that specialises in detecting and analysing information operations across social and online media, including campaigns run by hostile states such as Russia.

© RUSI, 2026.

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