With just weeks to go before parliamentary elections in Armenia, Yerevan’s National Security Service is closely monitoring the activities of the Armenian Apostolic Church and its supporters within the Russian Orthodox Church.
The activities of the Armenian Apostolic Church (AAC), led by the Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians Karekin II, are being closely monitored by Yerevan’s National Security Service (NSS) in the run-up to Armenia’s parliamentary elections.
The authorities suspect the Armenian Apostolic Church (IO, 14/11/25) of helping Moscow’s attempts to manipulate the 7 June vote and of being part of Russia’s array of hybrid attacks directed against the South Caucasus nation (IO, 14/11/25).
Tensions between Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Karekin II reached their high point in December when the premier said during a question-and-answer session in parliament that he “does not need a Catholicos who will obey him” but a Catholicos “who will not obey a lieutenant-colonel from a foreign special service”.
SVR connections
This was a thinly veiled reference to Karekin II’s brother, Archbishop Ezras Nersisyan, who the NSS alleges was recruited by the KGB in the 1980s and continues to work for Russian intelligence.
Suspicions were further fuelled after Metropolitan Anthony of Volokolamsk, head of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate (DECR), made a discreet courtesy visit to Nersisyan in Moscow.
The metropolitan has himself long been suspected of working for Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service, having in 2023 notably awarded a Swedish priest an SVR medal, along with a message from the service’s director Sergey Naryshkin.
Places of worship under surveillance
According to our sources, three sites are under particularly close surveillance in the run-up to the elections. The first is the Holy See of Etchmiadzin, which the NSS already raided on 27 June last year to arrest archbishop Mikael Ajapahyan, with the help of the service’s Alpha group.
The second is the Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri, north of Yerevan, also home to the Russian 102nd military base. It was from this cathedral that Ajapahyan called for a military coup against the authorities in Yerevan.
Finally, the NSS is also keeping an eye on Yerevan’s Church of the Intercession of the Most Holy Mother of God, also the headquarters of the Russian Orthodox Diocese of Armenia, established in 2023 with the support of Metropolitan Leonid of Klin. He is known as the “Prigozhin in a cassock” because of his ties with Russia’s late Wagner militia founder Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Leonid regularly voices his disapproval of Pashinyan’s actions against Karekin II, as well as Yerevan’s growing ties with Greek-American and European Christian and Orthodox circles. This rapprochement was evidenced by the visit of US Vice-President J.D. Vance in February.
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Direct link to this article: https://www.armenianclub.com/2026/05/19/armenia-keeping-tabs-on-russia-linked-churches-ahead-of-elections/