RFE/RL – Another Karapetian Ally Arrested

The Anti-Corruption Committee (ACC) charged Artur Avanesian, a senior member of Karapetian’s Strong Armenia alliance, with illegally promising “a number of citizens” jobs and other benefits if they vote for it.

Nicknamed Kandaz, Avanesian is a retired senior army officer and a prominent veteran of the wars in Nagorno-Karabakh. The ACC publicized the audio a wiretapped phone call in which he purportedly tells another Karabakh-born man that he will be hired by the Armenian military if Strong Armenia comes to power. The law-enforcement also detained three other persons. It did not identify them.

Another Strong Armenia figure, Arega Hovsepian, said Avanesian denies vote-buying accusations levelled against him.

“For 30 years, [Azerbaijani President Ilham] Aliyev failed to arrest Kandaz,” she said. “Now that is done by Armenia’s authorities.”

“This is making us even stronger. They can’t break us,” added Hovsepian.

In her words, investigators did not confiscate anything during a search conducted at Avanesian’s Yerevan apartment. It was not clear whether the ACC will seek court permission to hold him in detention pending investigation.

Another law-enforcement agency, the Investigative Committee, said earlier in the day that it has charged four members of a family in a village in the northern Shirak province with paying local residents cash to attend a Strong Armenia rally held in Yerevan on April 11. One of them was placed under house arrest. Karapetian’s bloc did not comment on that case.

The arrests were the latest in a series of criminal proceedings targeting Karapetian’s allies and supporters in the run-up to the June 7 parliamentary elections. They come amid speculation that the Armenian government is preparing the ground for Strong Armenia’s disqualification from the ballot.

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian was accused by critics of planning to secure an election victory through fraud or foul play when it emerged in December that his administration requested election-related assistance from the European Union. The EU foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, revealed that Yerevan is seeking the kind of “help to fight foreign malign interference” which the EU provided to Moldova ahead of parliamentary elections held there in September 2025. Two Moldovan opposition parties deemed pro-Russian were barred from participating in the elections won by the country’s pro-Western leadership.

Karapetian, 60, has mostly lived in Russia since the early 1990s and has a dual Russian nationality. Pashinian’s political allies have accused the tycoon of plotting to topple the Armenian government on the Kremlin’s orders ever since he entered politics following his controversial arrest last June.

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