May 16 2026

This material is part of a partnership with OC Media. You can read the original English version here.

As the first week of Armenia’s official election campaign period draws to a close, tensions have escalated, accompanied by new criminal charges of vote-buying and insulting political rhetoric, including allegations that candidates are being controlled from abroad.

On Thursday, Armenian authorities announced three separate criminal cases and numerous arrests, two of which were related to alleged vote-buying.

In one case, an undisclosed number of members and supporters of former President Robert Kocharyan’s “Armenia” bloc were arrested in Spitak (Lori Province).

Authorities claim that the head of the bloc’s local office provided charitable aid at a time when a legislative ban on charitable activities was in effect ahead of the parliamentary elections scheduled for June 7. The same individual, along with others, is also accused of “obstructing the free exercise of the electoral right of a resident of the same region, manifested in the threat of violence against the latter.”

This marked the first such criminal case against the “Armenia” bloc, which rejected the allegations, calling the case “not a legal process, but another cheap attempt to obstruct the normal functioning of our structures.”

The bloc also stated that “the authorities are trying to create an atmosphere of fear through such methods,” characterizing Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s government as an “authoritarian regime.”

Separately, Armenian police reported that a man was detained in Yerevan on Wednesday while handing over 50,000 drams ($135) to another person as an alleged election bribe. Authorities did not disclose which political party the case was linked to.

In another case, Armenian authorities arrested and launched an investigation into a man after he posted an online address on Tuesday containing insults directed at Pashinyan. The criminal case was initiated on charges of public speech aimed at inciting or promoting hatred, discrimination, intolerance, or enmity.

On Thursday, Pashinyan praised Armenia’s law enforcement agencies for their “effective fight” against election bribery.

The following day, in line with the trend of recent months, reports emerged of new arrests of members or supporters of the “Strong Armenia” bloc, led by Russian-Armenian tycoon Samvel Karapetyan.

Rhetoric of “Hambals” and Claims of External Control

In addition to the arrests, Kocharyan called Pashinyan a “hambal” (a crude, uneducated, or primitive person) during a heated discussion on Thursday. Pashinyan later used the same term in his response.

Kocharyan stated that no one in Armenia’s history had previously spoken out “against [national] identity and the Church.” “Hey, you hambal, what do you have against this? What is driving you? In all seriousness, why are you hurting an entire nation? For whose sake?” Kocharyan asked.

He further suggested that Pashinyan is being controlled from the outside.

“I have the impression that there is some kind of remote control, and there is a chip in [Pashinyan’s] head, and this head is being controlled by that remote from somewhere—definitely not from Armenia. Now this man, in my opinion, has become like [Azerbaijani President Ilham] Aliyev’s lapdog,” Kocharyan said.

He also argued that such rhetoric was a response to Pashinyan “crossing the line” in his statements.

Earlier on Thursday, Pashinyan stated that Kocharyan should be imprisoned for the bloody crackdown on anti-government protests in March 2008, which occurred during Kocharyan’s presidency and claimed 10 lives. In turn, Kocharyan accused Pashinyan of being the “instigator and the main person responsible” for those events.

Kocharyan also claimed that while three former presidents of Nagorno-Karabakh are imprisoned in Azerbaijan, Pashinyan received instructions via “remote control” to imprison the fourth, Kocharyan, in Armenia.

Before moving to Armenia, Kocharyan served as the president of Nagorno-Karabakh from 1994 to 1997.

“Kocharyan said that the word ‘hambal’ is accepted in the Civil Contract party. That is true, because when we talk about him, we use that very word—hambal,” Pashinyan said in his response in a Facebook video on Thursday evening.

In another video, he challenged Kocharyan to write the word “identity” live on air, in what appeared to be a jab at Kocharyan’s linguistic skills.

“Western Azerbaijan” vs. the Union State

Karapetyan, whose “Strong Armenia” bloc is expected to be the main rival to Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party in the upcoming elections, also stated on Thursday that Armenian border villages have become deserted due to demographic trends. He further claimed that if Pashinyan is re-elected, 300,000 Azerbaijanis will be resettled in Armenia.

The claim about the resettlement of Azerbaijanis in Armenia has become a recurring talking point for Karapetyan and other opposition figures. In turn, Pashinyan rejected these accusations, calling them “lies.”

“Such an issue has never been on our agenda with Azerbaijan, nor on our broader international agenda. These people are now spending millions of dollars to create and inject this agenda into the political life of the Republic of Armenia. Only foreign spies act in this manner,” Pashinyan stated on Friday.

In addition to statements by politicians, AI-generated videos have also circulated online, including claims that if Pashinyan is re-elected, Armenia will become “Western Azerbaijan,” while if the opposition comes to power, Armenia will join a “Union State” with Russia and Belarus.

In recent years, Azerbaijan has launched a campaign around the concept of “Western Azerbaijan”—a term that refers not to its own territory, but to part or all of the territory of the Republic of Armenia.

OC Media: For ease of reading, we have chosen not to use qualifiers such as “de facto,” “unrecognized,” or “partially recognized” when discussing institutions or political positions in Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and South Ossetia. This does not imply that we take any position on their status.

https://sovanews.tv/en/2026/05/16/criminal-cases-insults-and-claims-of-foreign-control-armenias-election-campaign-heats-up/

Caucasian Knot

May 17 2026

The destruction of an election poster should have been treated as an administrative offense, and the criminal prosecution and detention of Armenian resident Armen Hovhannisyan were illegal, human rights activists and a lawyer stated after the detainee committed suicide.

As reported by the “Caucasian Knot,” on May 16, it was reported that Armenian resident Armen Hovhannisyan committed suicide in the Nubarashen Psychiatric Hospital after being detained after tearing down an election poster.

A case was opened against Hovhannisyan under Article 211 of the Criminal Code (obstructing campaigning). He was initially held in a detention facility, but no charges were brought against him. He was then transferred to a psychiatric hospital after security forces noticed his unstable behavior, Factor.am reported.

Human rights activists and a lawyer criticized security forces for prosecuting Hovhannisyan
Five human rights activists issued a statement in connection with the death of the detainee, Aysor.am reported today. The authors of the joint statement, whose names are not included in the publication, considered the man’s detention “a gross violation of the law by the law enforcement system.”

“The act of tearing down a poster is clearly defined in the legislation of the Republic of Armenia in Article 40.11 of the Code of Administrative Offenses and cannot serve as grounds for initiating a criminal case or, even more so, for arresting a person in criminal proceedings. This is an elementary legal truth that all officials involved in the process were obliged to know and take into account. However, a reality has developed in Armenia in which the law enforcement system has become a political tool, and the law is subject to arbitrary interpretation,” the human rights activists stated.

They are convinced that the incident cannot be presented as an “accident” or a “personal tragedy.” “This is a consequence of legal permissiveness, impunity, and the flagrant distortion of the law by law enforcement agencies,” the statement reads.

Damaging the poster can in no way entail criminal liability.

Lawyer Hovhannes Khudoyan expressed a similar opinion, commenting on the detainee’s suicide. “Damaging a campaign poster is an administrative offense (Article 40.11 of the RA Code of Administrative Offenses). The penalty is a fine of 50,000-100,000 drams (from 135 to 270 dollars. – Note from the “Caucasian Knot”). Damaging a poster can in no way entail criminal liability. The death of a man who committed suicide in the Nubarashen Psychiatric Hospital lies on the conscience of law enforcement officials if the facts presented in the media are confirmed,” the publication quotes him as saying today.

Authorities stated that doctors were unable to save the detainee
The Armenian Ministry of Internal Affairs and Ministry of Health commented on Hovhannisyan’s death today, News.am reports.

According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Hovhannisyan was detained and was initially held in the detention facility of the Artashat Community Police Department. “On May 16, at approximately 9:30 a.m., the detainee was observed exhibiting mental instability, after which an ambulance was called. On the instructions of an ambulance doctor, the detainee, accompanied by police officers, was taken by ambulance to a mental health center,” the publication quoted the ministry’s statement.

The Ministry of Health, in turn, stated that the suicide was committed “in a very short period of time.”

“Medical personnel immediately responded to the situation and carried out the necessary emergency measures, but were unable to save the patient’s life. The patient, who had the status of a detainee, was monitored in accordance with the procedure established by law. All circumstances of the incident are being investigated by law enforcement agencies,” the publication quoted the Ministry of Health’s statement.

Activity of opponents of the ruling party attracts particular attention from security forces
As a reminder, on May 16, security forces also detained 10 supporters of the Strong Party Armenia,” who are suspected of obstructing the election campaign of representatives of the ruling party in the Lori region.

The day before, on May 15, security forces in the Yerevan metro detained a woman who had used a felt-tip pen to write a message on an election poster of the ruling Civil Contract party. The woman has been incommunicado, her lawyer reported.

The arrests of opposition supporters come amid accusations against the ruling party of abuse of power. Thus, on May 15, former Armenian Ombudsman Arman Tatoyan, who heads the Wings of Unity party’s candidate list, stated that college students in Armavir were forced to participate in a pre-election event in the interests of Armenia’s ruling party.

On May 13, teachers and students from schools in the Aragatsotn region, instead of attending school, participated in the ruling party’s election campaign. The Electoral Commission recalled that involving public sector employees and schoolchildren in election campaigning contradicts the Electoral Code. Representatives of the ruling party distanced themselves from the incident, but observers and the teachers themselves confirmed the violation.

Armenia’s parliamentary elections are scheduled for June 7. Seventeen parties and two blocs have been admitted. Samvel Karapetyan’s “Strong Armenia,” Robert Kocharyan’s “Armenia” bloc, and Gagik Tsarukyan’s “Prosperous Armenia” party are the most pro-Russian candidates in the upcoming elections. The Kremlin is backing Karapetyan, but he is legally ineligible to participate. The “Caucasian Knot” has prepared a report titled “2026 Elections to the National Assembly (Parliament) of Armenia.”

Translated automatically via Google translate from class=”gmail_default” st1yle=”font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small”>
Source: Caucasian Knot

Eurasia Review

May 18 2026

OC Media

May 18 2026

A court in Yerevan has accepted a defamation case filed by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan against Russian-Armenian tycoon Samvel Karapetyan, who heads the Strong Armenia Alliance and is Pashinyan’s highest-polling competitor in the upcoming parliamentary elections. Earlier in May, Karapetyan had accused Pashinyan of taking hallucinogenic mushrooms he had obtained in China before making public speeches, which he said was a reason not to take Pashinyan seriously.

Pashinyan swiftly denied the allegations and said shortly after he planned to file a lawsuit against Karapetyan.

‘Naturally, I am going to sue [Karapetyan] and, in the legal sense of the word, make [Karapetyan] eat one tonne of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Excuse my harsh language, but in the end, everything has its limits’, Pashinyan said earlier in May.

The state-run media outlet Armenpress reported on Friday that the lawsuit had been accepted, and that Pashinyan was demanding restitution of ֏6 million ($16,250) in damages, as well as an official retraction and apology from Karapetyan.

Despite being named its prime ministerial candidate, Karapetyan has not been included in the alliance’s electoral list. His nomination has sparked controversy due to legal requirements that stipulate that candidates for the position should hold only Armenian citizenship and have resided in the country for the past four years — requirements Karapetyan does not mean.

Karapetyan announced in April that he had initiated the process of renouncing his Russian and Cypriot citizenship ahead of the elections.

He is currently under house arrest over criminal charges of calling for a coup.

Italy – May 18 2026

OC Media

May 18 2026

Armenia’s Investigative Committee has launched an investigation over an alleged plot to assassinate Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. The case, announced on Monday, came after a video was circulated online showing a group of masked and armed men directly addressing Pashinyan and saying, ‘we know where and when you are going […] you must answer for your every step’.

‘Motivated by hatred and intolerance, and combined with hooligan motives during a live broadcast, they disseminated a video containing a threat that poses a real danger of committing murder against the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia, related to his state and political activities and conditioned by his political views’, the Investigative Committee said.

An investigation on the grounds of an assassination plot, illegal trafficking of weapons, and computer sabotage has been opened, the committee said, the latter being due to the fact the suspects ‘accessed restricted computer network data to share the video during a live broadcast’.

In the video, along with the threats, a masked man blamed Pashinyan for the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh and repeatedly called him a liar. The man also alleged that Pashinyan wants to ‘hand over Armenia to Azerbaijan’, and said Armenians should not vote for him in the upcoming parliamentary elections.

The unknown individual was speaking in a Nagorno-Karabakh dialect, and the flag of Nagorno-Karabakh was present throughout the video on the wall behind him.

Shortly after, Pashinyan responded with his own set of insults and allegations, calling the men ‘scum’ and ‘scoundrels’ and claiming they were from Nagorno-Karabakh but had ‘ran away’.

‘They have put on masks, as if they are strong men. But do you know why they are wearing masks? Because once they take them off, we will see that these are the ones who abandoned our soldiers and ran away, filled with fear’, Pashinyan said with visible anger.

‘You ran away at Ferrari speed — who are you to speak?’, he added, apparently suggesting that they were former soldiers who had fled during Azerbaijan’s final offensive in the region in 2023.

He vowed to find them ‘one by one’ and urged them to voluntarily show up.

Daniel Ioannisyan from the Union of Informed Citizens organisation, claimed it was ‘a clear example of a Russian false-flag operation’. He described it as a ‘classic Russian’ action to frame Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians, along with other efforts to create tensions and foster internal divisions.

In contrast, human rights activist and opposition figure Nina Karapetyants claimed the possibility the entire plot could have been fabricated by Armenian authorities should not be excluded. She did not provide evidence to support her allegations.

May 18 2026

Among the many unintended consequences of President Donald Trump’s disastrous decision to launch a war on Iran is the delaying of the so-called Caucasus Corridor, known as the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP). The project was supposed to bring peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which have been at war on and off for nearly 40 years.

This may turn out to be a blessing in disguise. In a region where Western-backed megaprojects have become major targets for Iranian attacks, abandoning the corridor may have been the best thing that could happen to Armenia.

The project in question — a transportation link through southern Armenia to the Azerbaijani exclave Nakhchevan and Turkey – was hailed as a decisive geopolitical break of the South Caucasus with Russian and Iranian influence. Pundits flattered Trump’s ego by promoting it as a stepping stone for the Nobel Peace Prize for the American president.

There has been reason for skepticism about these claims from the start. Last year, I argued in these pages that “peace requires more than diplomatic theater; it demands difficult compromises that have so far been absent. Until then, the promise of stability remains a mirage.”

Indeed, reality proved far messier than Trump’s vanity play. The signing ceremony in the White House in August 2025, involving Trump and the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, did not usher in a peace agreement. Talks stalled as Azerbaijan insisted on changes to the Armenian constitution that would formally and permanently forsake Armenia’s claims on Nagorno-Karabakh, a region largely populated by ethnic Armenians prior to an Azerbaijani military campaign in 2023.

The corridor, meanwhile, has increasingly drifted into irrelevance. The agreement stipulated that the corridor would be managed by a joint Armenian-American company based in Armenia. But the company was never established, and the contract was never signed. Consequently, all the other building blocks – funding, security, cross-border and transit modalities – were never put in place.

Now, with the war on Iran consuming the Trump administration’s bandwidth, the project languishes. “Obviously, TRIPP isn’t a high priority with the U.S. administration, at least today,” Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan admitted in March. “Unfortunately, there is a high probability that this will affect the time frame.”

But here’s the rub: the project’s unraveling has spared Armenia from becoming entangled in Iran’s expanding definition of legitimate retaliatory targets.

Because when war broke out with Iran, neighboring countries hosting American infrastructure — military bases, substantial business presence — became such targets, as Iran warned they would.

That threat doesn’t just concern the obvious candidates in the Persian Gulf, such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. In early March, Iranian-launched drones struck targets in Nakhchevan, Azerbaijan, including its airport, wounding four civilians. Tehran has always been highly suspicious of Baku’s close security ties with Israel, even accusing it of permitting Israel to use its air space in attacking Iran.

Moreover, Iran has long suspected Baku of supporting Azeri irredentism in Iran, which has 15 to 20 million residents of Azeri descent. A number of hawkish, U.S.-based think tanks have promoted such a policy. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev himself occasionally seemed to flirt with the idea, positioning himself as the leader of all Azeris in the world, including those in Iran.Among the many unintended consequences of President Donald Trump’s disastrous decision to launch a war on Iran is the delaying of the so-called Caucasus Corridor, known as the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP). The project was supposed to bring peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which have been at war on and off for nearly 40 years.

This may turn out to be a blessing in disguise. In a region where Western-backed megaprojects have become major targets for Iranian attacks, abandoning the corridor may have been the best thing that could happen to Armenia.

The project in question — a transportation link through southern Armenia to the Azerbaijani exclave Nakhchevan and Turkey – was hailed as a decisive geopolitical break of the South Caucasus with Russian and Iranian influence. Pundits flattered Trump’s ego by promoting it as a stepping stone for the Nobel Peace Prize for the American president.

There has been reason for skepticism about these claims from the start. Last year, I argued in these pages that “peace requires more than diplomatic theater; it demands difficult compromises that have so far been absent. Until then, the promise of stability remains a mirage.”

Indeed, reality proved far messier than Trump’s vanity play. The signing ceremony in the White House in August 2025, involving Trump and the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, did not usher in a peace agreement. Talks stalled as Azerbaijan insisted on changes to the Armenian constitution that would formally and permanently forsake Armenia’s claims on Nagorno-Karabakh, a region largely populated by ethnic Armenians prior to an Azerbaijani military campaign in 2023.

The corridor, meanwhile, has increasingly drifted into irrelevance. The agreement stipulated that the corridor would be managed by a joint Armenian-American company based in Armenia. But the company was never established, and the contract was never signed. Consequently, all the other building blocks – funding, security, cross-border and transit modalities – were never put in place.

Now, with the war on Iran consuming the Trump administration’s bandwidth, the project languishes. “Obviously, TRIPP isn’t a high priority with the U.S. administration, at least today,” Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan admitted in March. “Unfortunately, there is a high probability that this will affect the time frame.”

But here’s the rub: the project’s unraveling has spared Armenia from becoming entangled in Iran’s expanding definition of legitimate retaliatory targets.

Because when war broke out with Iran, neighboring countries hosting American infrastructure — military bases, substantial business presence — became such targets, as Iran warned they would.

That threat doesn’t just concern the obvious candidates in the Persian Gulf, such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. In early March, Iranian-launched drones struck targets in Nakhchevan, Azerbaijan, including its airport, wounding four civilians. Tehran has always been highly suspicious of Baku’s close security ties with Israel, even accusing it of permitting Israel to use its air space in attacking Iran.

Moreover, Iran has long suspected Baku of supporting Azeri irredentism in Iran, which has 15 to 20 million residents of Azeri descent. A number of hawkish, U.S.-based think tanks have promoted such a policy. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev himself occasionally seemed to flirt with the idea, positioning himself as the leader of all Azeris in the world, including those in Iran.