Russia has unleashed what researchers are calling an unusually intense barrage of overt and covert influence operations before a parliamentary election on Sunday in Armenia, which has sought closer ties with Europe and the United States.
Groups linked to the Kremlin and Russian intelligence agencies have for months flooded the internet with attacks against Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who has publicly clashed with Moscow after a breakdown in security cooperation between the two countries, according to government and independent researchers who track Russian influence campaigns.
The groups have spread scores of false narratives across social media platforms, accusing Mr. Pashinyan of corruption, a conspiracy to attack Russia and a multitude of crimes, including sexual assault and trafficking of human organs. Other messages include a claim that Mr. Pashinyan, 51, has hidden an incurable disease.
Many of the tactics are familiar from Russian campaigns targeting recent elections in the United States and Europe. The intensity has underscored the priority that Russia has given to ousting the government in Armenia, a former Soviet republic with about three million people that was once considered a reliable ally.
“It seems to be they’re pulling in all their assets and pointing them toward Armenia,” said Joseph Bodnar, a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a research organization that documented the campaigns in a report released last week.
It remains to be seen how effective the campaigns will be. Russia’s influence operations have fallen short in recent elections in countries the Kremlin once dominated.
In Moldova, another former Soviet republic, a pro-European government won re-election last fall despite a similar assault online. In April, voters in Hungary ousted Viktor Orban, the European leader most sympathetic to Moscow, after 16 years in office, despite overt and covert support from Russia.
In Armenia, Mr. Pashinyan’s party, Civil Contract, has been leading in the polls, and last week he picked up an endorsement from President Trump, who has broken with the longstanding tradition of American presidents’ officially staying out of foreign elections.
The European Union held a summit last month in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, reflecting both the bloc’s support for the country and Mr. Pashinyan’s efforts to court Europe. The E.U. also established an expert mission to help fight Russian influence operations.
“We have used all the tools that we have against this,” said Ruben Rubinyan, a top member of Mr. Pashinyan’s party and the vice president of the Parliament. “Hopefully, the people will see, and hopefully in this new age of A.I. and disinformation, people are better equipped to differentiate between what is true and what is false.”
A torrent of homegrown disinformation has also engulfed the election, with political attacks illustrated by fake images and videos generated by artificial intelligence tools. They include posts falsely showing preparations for rallies supporting L.G.B.T.Q. issues, a divisive theme in Armenian politics that Russian actors also frequently exploit.
The Russian campaigns have involved Kremlin-linked groups identified previously by researchers and Western governments. They include a marketing company in Moscow, the Social Design Agency, which specializes in short videos that impersonate real news organizations and fabricate criticism of their targets.
NewsGuard, a company that tracks false narratives online, found 31 examples of the company’s work in a single week last month. The videos were posted within minutes of one another by anonymous accounts on X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk.
The campaigns have impersonated news organizations and created fake ones to publish manipulated videos that have millions of views. One fabricated English-language site, linked to a former deputy sheriff from Florida who sought asylum in Moscow, accused Mr. Pashinyan of “banning” Jesus Christ in the world’s oldest Christian nation because of a dispute over a large statue.
After the The New York Times recently reported on Russia’s hijacking of real users on Bluesky, a rival platform, new videos impersonating The Times appeared on X and Bluesky. The videos used content from the original news article to falsely claim that Armenians were hacking the accounts to aid Mr. Pashinyan’s campaign.
Other videos used doctored videos of celebrities, including Cher, Javier Bardem and Jake Busey, to create false narratives.
The Social Design Agency did not respond to a request for comment. John Mark Dougan, the former sheriff’s deputy who has been involved in Russian influence campaigns targeting American elections, sidestepped questions about the websites that researchers have linked to him.
“Armenia?” he wrote in a text message. “Never heard of it.”
Other parts of Russia’s campaign operate openly.
The Foundation to Battle Injustice, an organization in Moscow that the European Union put under punitive sanctions last year for spreading propaganda, has published at least a dozen articles attacking Mr. Pashinyan and those close to him, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. The Russian organization amplified them using hundreds of accounts on X.
One of the articles, which accused Mr. Pashinyan of authorizing the harvesting of human organs for France, had been seen more than five million times when it appeared in March.
Paul Sonne contributed reporting from Sevkar, Armenia.
Steven Lee Myers covers misinformation and disinformation from San Francisco. Since joining The Times in 1989, he has reported from around the world, including Moscow, Baghdad, Beijing and Seoul.
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