If you believed everything its leaders say about each other, you would conclude Armenia is doomed.

Its prime minister is accused of being a magic-mushroom-chewing lunatic. His challenger is denounced as a billionaire Kremlin spy. The powerful head of the Armenian Church – the third man in this political saga – is alleged to be a Moscow-backed schemer with a secret love-child.

Once a Soviet backwater, Armenia now finds itself at a strategic Eurasian crossroads, the potential missing link in the only major overland trade and energy route between Asia and Europe that bypasses both Russia and Iran.

For a nation still traumatised by genocide and territorial loss, that sudden geopolitical importance is both an opportunity and a curse.

As Armenians prepare to vote in a general election next week – the latest front line in the shadow war between Russia and the West – the cost of that new prominence has become painfully clear.

The country is awash with Kremlin-linked disinformation. According to Bot Blocker, an anonymous collective of Russian dissident tech analysts, Armenia is facing the second-largest state-backed disinformation campaign in modern European history, beaten only by last year’s failed attempt to unseat Moldova’s pro-Western president Maia Sandu.

The group says it has identified hundreds of fabricated videos targeting Nikol Pashinyan, whose ruling Civil Contract Party wants closer ties with the West and greater distance from Moscow.

Early claims that the prime minister was a child trafficker who embezzled funds to buy mansions abroad have since mutated into allegations that he has reached a secret deal with Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, to launch a war against Russia after the election.

Yet the misinformation often pales beside the vitriol hurled by the candidates themselves. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the feud between Mr Pashinyan and his chief rival Samvel Karapetyan, a circus-owning billionaire whom the prime minister accuses of being dispatched by the Kremlin to drag Armenia back into Moscow’s orbit.

The oligarch who came in from the cold

A little more than a year ago, Mr Karapetyan was barely involved in Armenian public life. He had spent the past three decades mostly in Moscow, Dubai and Monaco, building a Russia-focused retail and logistics empire reportedly worth £3bn.

Much of that fortune came from lucrative contracts linked to Gazprom, one of the principal pillars of Vladimir Putin’s patronage system.

He returned to Armenia last year after his father’s death. Within weeks, he was under arrest.

A major benefactor of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Mr Karapetyan had inserted himself into an escalating conflict between the prime minister and the religious establishment.

Relations between Mr Pashinyan and Karekin II, the Catholicos of All Armenians, have been poisoned since Armenia’s catastrophic defeats by Azerbaijan in 2020 and 2023, which culminated in the loss of the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh and the flight of its 120,000 ethnic Armenians.

Breaking with the Church’s traditional political neutrality, Karekin demanded the prime minister’s resignation. Mr Pashinyan retaliated by accusing the Catholicos of corruption, violating his vow of celibacy and turning the Church into a vehicle for Russian influence.

The row has triggered the deepest church-state crisis in the modern history of a country that describes itself as the world’s first Christian nation.

Mr Karapetyan was detained after publicly backing the Church and vowing to defend it “in our way”, words the authorities interpreted as a threat to overthrow the constitutional order.

“All I meant was that I hoped to mediate the conflict,” he told The Telegraph in the grounds of his mansion in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, where he is under house arrest. “An hour later, this house was surrounded by hundreds of officers and I was arrested.”

For seven months he was held in the underground detention cells of Armenia’s national security service, the successor agency to the Soviet KGB. His arrest transformed a man better known as the proprietor of the country’s electricity grid, biggest pizza chain and leading circus into a political figure.

To supporters angered by Mr Pashinyan’s attacks on the Church, his pivot towards the West and his attempts to reconcile with Azerbaijan and Turkey, Mr Karapetyan became a martyr.

He has rapidly eclipsed Armenia’s older pro-Russia opposition figures despite the awkward detail that, as a dual Russian and Cypriot citizen, he cannot currently serve as prime minister – a constitutional barrier he says will be removed once his newly formed Strong Armenia Party enters office.

He insists he entered politics to protect the Church from persecution.

“The government has intensified its attacks on both the Church and the Armenian national identity,” he said. “It has arrested bishops and archbishops. My concern is that he will seek to arrest the Catholicos as well.”

Church, state and deep state

Some say the real picture is less noble.

“The Church has historically aligned itself with whoever holds power,” said Artur Sakunts, a prominent Armenian human rights activist. “Under Soviet rule it was closely tied to the KGB. Before the 2018 pro-democracy revolution, it stood with the authoritarian regime. Since then it has remained close to Putin.”

Particular scrutiny has fallen on the Church’s Moscow branch, headed by Karekin’s brother, Archbishop Ezras, who in 2023 blessed commanders of the Arbat Battalion, a notorious Armenian mercenary unit fighting for Russia in Ukraine.

Ukrainian intelligence alleges that Mr Karapetyan helped finance the battalion, a claim he denies.

Last year Armenian authorities also claimed to have foiled a plot involving the Arbat Battalion and senior clergy aimed at overthrowing the government.

Mr Pashinyan portrays both the church leadership and Mr Karapetyan as a Kremlin-backed “fifth column” working against Armenian sovereignty – an accusation both men reject.

“I am simply a patriot,” Mr Karapetyan said. “It is this government that undermines democracy at the behest of foreign forces, not me.”

Some analysts believe the Russian threat is exaggerated.

The Kremlin discredited itself in Armenia when Russian peacekeepers stood aside during Azerbaijan’s seizure of Nagorno-Karabakh despite Moscow’s own security guarantees. Many Armenians have never forgiven what they see as a betrayal.

“Russia’s standing in Armenia has fallen sharply,” says Thomas de Waal, of Carnegie Europe, the Brussels-based think tank. “Its options in Armenia are limited. The old pro-Russian parties are discredited and Karapetyan’s movement still lacks a compelling vision.”

Polls suggest Mr Pashinyan’s party will still emerge as the largest force. But his popularity has declined sharply since the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh, while some accuse him of growing increasingly authoritarian and portraying all dissent as pro-Russian.

“What we are seeing is less about Russia than about personalities,” said Richard Giragosian, the director of the Regional Studies Centre, an Armenian think tank. “Pashinyan is pursuing a vendetta against a church leader who is not especially popular among his own bishops, many of whom resent his political activism.”

The feud has often descended into outright farce.

Last year, priests loyal to Karekin accused the prime minister of being uncircumcised, implying he was secretly Muslim and therefore aligned with Azerbaijan and Turkey.

Mr Pashinyan responded by offering to show the Catholicos his penis.

Nor has the prime minister always helped himself. While campaigning in March, he berated a displaced woman from Nagorno-Karabakh and her young son on the Yerevan metro after they refused to wear his party badges, wagging his finger in their faces, mocking them for fleeing the war and ignoring their pleas for him to leave them alone.

Such incidents have strengthened claims that he is increasingly erratic.

Earlier this month, Mr Karapetyan – whose party has promised a Ministry of Sex to address demographic decline and ensure “there are no unsatisfied women” – alleged that the prime minister had ordered a ton of hallucinogenic mushrooms from China to help him through official meetings. Mr Pashinyan denies the accusation and is suing.

Given the geopolitical stakes, Armenia’s election matters enormously. But it is also spectacularly unedifying – something the Kremlin will no doubt find immensely gratifying.

“In many ways, the greatest threat to Pashinyan is not Russia,” says one Western diplomat. “It is Pashinyan himself.”