On May 29, Reuters reported that the Russian state was planning to fly out 100,000 Armenians based in Russia in a covert attempt to interfere in the upcoming election and unseat incumbent Nikol Pashinyan, a scheme Russian officials priced at $50 million. The story is unconfirmed, although some Russian-Armenians have shared messages they received giving credence to the report, but the more immediate question is where a Russian state financing a grinding, years-long war of aggression in Ukraine was planning to find the money in the first place. Armenia is the latest challenge to Russia’s post-Soviet periphery; if Pashinyan, who has already suspended Armenia’s participation in Russia’s CSTO military alliance and openly aligned with the West, wins re-election, Armenia’s westward break becomes a precedent Russia cannot afford and another crack in its post-1991 architecture, in the middle of its quagmire in Ukraine.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Armenia’s alignment with Russia seemed inevitable: like many post-Soviet states, the landlocked country found itself structurally dependent on Moscow for energy, security and the troops garrisoned on its own soil. In 1992, Armenia became of the founding members of the CSTO, Russia’s answer to NATO. This dependence on Russia looked like partnership for decades until September 2023, when Russian peacekeepers stood by and watched Azerbaijan end Armenian presence in Nagorno-Karabakh and pulled out altogether in the aftermath. With an Armenian population revolted about Karabakh, Pashinyan, who has liberalized and democratized the country since his advent in 2018, got the domestic mandate to pivot away from Russia and towards the West and, in particular, the European Union.
In 2024, Pashinyan suspended Armenia’s participation in the CSTO and called for the withdrawal of Russian troops. He secured an EU integration framework and, most dramatically, greenlighted the TRIPP corridor, a US-brokered route across southern Armenia that would connect Europe to Central Asia while bypassing both Russia and Iran, undermining one of the Kremlin’s most valuable logistical strangleholds in the region. The reaction from the Kremlin has been as swift as it has been predictable: threats of interference, warnings that EU integration is incompatible with Armenia’s membership of the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, restrictions on imports of Armenian products and threats to withdraw access to discounted natural gas. Its latest response has been somewhat novel: to use the roughly two million Armenians living and working in Russia as both a pressure point and an electoral weapon to tamper with the country’s elections.
Old habits die hard: the playbook being deployed in Armenia was already operationalized before. In 2014 and 2025, Russia massively interfered in Moldova’s national elections through mass disinformation campaigns, a Kremlin-backed oligarch funding the opposition, the bussing in of Transnistrian voters and the bribing of voters in the occupied region. In Georgia, sustained pressure, a captured judiciary and a pro-Russian ruling party delivered Moscow a friendlier government, through thinly veiled fraud, without the need for overt interference. The Armenian operation follows the same logic: a billionaire candidate in Samvel Karapetyan, Armenian-Russian and currently on trial for calling for the overthrow of the government; a newly established Kremlin directorate specifically tasked with running influence operations in Armenia; and a disinformation campaign that, according to the Berlin-based ZOiS research centre, ranks as one of the largest state-backed operations in modern European history. The voter airlift, confirmed or not, is the newest element of a campaign that is otherwise eerily familiar.
The Kremlin is likely to be disappointed. Pashinyan is polling at around 60%, with Karapetyan’s Strong Armenia party struggling to crack the 20% ceiling. Even if Moscow succeeded in transporting 100,000 voters, the arithmetic does not work in a proportional system with a gap that wide. Eurasianet, one of the more sober analysts of the Caucasus, called any such effort “a waste of time and money.” The Kremlin appears to know this: the voter airlift was a plan discussed, priced and assigned regional quotas, according to Reuters. What remains is the disinformation campaign, the economic coercion and the hope that a fifth of undecided Armenian voters break heavily against Pashinyan, but all of this is a rearguard action, not a strategy, which seems to be a recurring issue in Russia’s foreign endeavors.
The significance of June 7 is not limited to Armenia; a Pashinyan win would cement Armenia’s westward break; Russian troops would likely be withdrawn, TRIPP greenlit, EU integration underway. For Moscow, this would be a structural setback. Armenia has served as a garrison state, an economic dependent and a blueprint of the kind of captivity Russia has relied upon to maintain its post-Soviet architecture. Losing it, in the middle of a war that has already exposed the limits of Russian hard power is a different order of defeat. The frantic interference and spending from the Kremlin supports this theory of panic.
June 7 seems to be Pashinyan’s to lose. But a won election is not an end in and of itself; Russia does not need to win on polling day to retain influence in Armenia: it needs only to keep the country economically dependent, politically polarized and strategically hesitant. The disinformation campaign will not stop on June 8, nor will the gas threats. The two million Armenians in Russia remain a pressure point. The West, slow to grasp the significance of the Caucasus, cannot afford to treat a Pashinyan victory as a non-event. EU integration needs resources behind it, not just frameworks and statements. The Kremlin is on the verge of losing a fundamental stronghold in a region that is crucial to its security framework; the question is whether the West is serious enough to make that loss permanent and to leverage it.
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