Russia Is Trying to Steal Armenia’s Election—the US Must Act | Opinion

Newsweek
May 7 2026

Russia Is Trying to Steal Armenia’s Election—the US Must Act | Opinion

By Joseph Epstein: Director of the Turan Research Center and Senior Fellow at the Yorktown Institute

Two of the Kremlin’s top propagandists are openly calling for war against Armenia.

On Sunday, Margarita Simonyan—head of Russian state-funded broadcaster RT—reacted to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s appearance at a European summit in Yerevan by declaring it was “time to think about protecting the Russian population and our interests in that country.” “Protecting the Russian population” is the exact justification President Vladimir Putin used for the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Vladimir Solovyov, Russia’s highest-rated television anchor, has gone further still, calling on air for a “special military operation” against Armenia.

This is the soundtrack to a Kremlin campaign that began the moment Yerevan turned west—and it is now reaching its decisive moment. On June 7, Armenia votes. The parliamentary election is a referendum on Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and, more consequentially, on whether his country continues toward the West and peace, or returns to managed conflict under Russian dominion. Washington has weeks, not months, to make sure it ends the right way.

Roughly seventy percent of America’s rare earth imports come from China—the minerals inside every smartphone, electric vehicle and precision-guided weapon. The Trump administration has spent a year working to break that dependence, and one of its biggest bets sits on a corridor through Armenia. The Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) is the corridor that gets Central Asia’s vast and untapped critical mineral reserves to market without passing through Russia, Iran or China. It will run from Azerbaijan through Armenian territory to the Nakhchivan exclave.
Putin understands what is at stake. At an April 1 meeting in Moscow, he pressed Pashinyan to allow dual Russian-Armenian citizens to run in the elections—a thinly veiled intervention on behalf of Samvel Karapetyan, the Russia-based billionaire bankrolling the opposition Strong Armenia party. Karapetyan currently sits under house arrest in Yerevan on money laundering charges and allegations of plotting a coup. Putin added that Russia has “many friends in Armenia, many.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declared that Moscow “reserves the right” to discuss Armenia’s elections.
The threats are converting into action. Moscow has banned dairy and produce shipments, gutted the flower trade and suspended arms deliveries that Armenia had already paid for. It also likely ordered Wildberries and Ozon—Russia’s two dominant online retailers akin to Amazon—to halt sales of Armenian-made goods, choking a major sales channel for an economy that exported nearly $3 billion to Russia last year. On April 22, the deputy secretary of Russia’s Security Council went further, warning that Armenia would lose 23 percent of its GDP and see inflation jump more than twenty points if it pursued European Union membership—a threat dressed as economic analysis.

From house arrest, Karapetyan warns voters that reelecting Pashinyan means “poverty and enmity with Russia.” His Strong Armenia party has lifted the Kremlin playbook from Moldova—where pro-Russian operatives funneled $39 million into a 2024 vote-buying scheme. Armenia’s Anti-Corruption Committee has now detained five Strong Armenia representatives for offering citizens cash for votes and for paying Armenians to attend opposition rallies.

The propaganda war is broader still. Local fact checkers reported a spike in Russian-aligned disinformation in the run-up to the election. Karekin II, leader of the Armenian Apostolic Church, has turned the institution against the government—a role mirroring the Moscow-aligned Orthodox Church in prewar Ukraine. Karapetyan retained Robert Amsterdam, the lobbyist who previously represented pro-Kremlin Ukrainian oligarch Vadim Novinsky. Tucker Carlson, with his well-documented record of amplifying Russian narratives, has hosted anti-Pashinyan voices, including Amsterdam and Karapetyan’s nephew.

The assault extends to Washington itself. The Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) has lobbied Congress against Pashinyan and against TRIPP, which its policy director dismissed as a “neo-colonial U.S.-backed corporate consortium.” Civilnet, an Armenian diaspora outlet partially funded by the EU and, previously, USAID, hosts English-language programming that refers to Azerbaijan solely as the “Baku regime”—language used by Armenian nationalists and Tehran—calls the peace process “Finlandization,” and floats the idea of Armenia striking Azerbaijani oil pipelines. These are the same pipelines that supply European countries seeking alternatives to Russian energy.

None of it has stopped the peace process from delivering results. On April 29, Azerbaijani Deputy Prime Minister Sahin Mustafayev flew to Yerevan for border delimitation talks—the first visit by a senior Azerbaijani official to the Armenian capital. Days earlier, Armenian and Azerbaijani civil society representatives concluded their fourth round of meetings under the Peace Bridge Initiative.

The peace process is real, and so is the threat to it. A Kremlin-backed victory on June 7 would mean a Karapetyan administration owing its office to Moscow and paying the debt in policy—shelving the peace agreement, freezing TRIPP and handing Russia the veto over Caucasus trade it has wielded for a generation. The first peace deal Trump brokered in his second term unravels not by a treaty but by a vote.

But Washington has options.

It can designate Samvel Karapetyan and Strong Armenia’s senior leadership under existing United States sanctions authorities. Treasury could use Executive Order 14024—used to sanction Georgian Dream founder Bidzina Ivanishvili—for a foreign directed campaign to subvert a democratic vote.

It can also announce a U.S.-Armenia critical minerals partnership before the vote. Frame it as the deal it is: rare earths out of China’s grip, processing capacity for American manufacturers, jobs at home and a Western alternative for an Armenian economy Moscow is trying to strangle.

And it can hold ANCA-aligned members of Congress to account. ANCA directly supports the interests of U.S. adversaries like Russia and Iran. Lawmakers who accept ANCA’s endorsement should be asked whether they endorse the group’s characterization of TRIPP as a “neo-colonial consortium.”

Putin’s offensive is not just against Armenia; it is against an American diplomatic intervention that helped bring peace to the South Caucasus. The Armenia-Azerbaijan peace deal was an early signature win of this administration. Whether it survives June 7 will be decided in the next six weeks—and in part by what Washington does, or fails to do, between now and then.

Joseph Epstein is director of the Turan Research Center and senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute.

All views expressed in this article are the writer’s own

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