Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan speaks at an international summit in Almaty, Kazakhstan, in early 2023. The Kremlin views Pashinyan as its enemy and is attempting to install its preferred candidate in Armenia’s upcoming election. (Shutterstock/Vladimir Tretyakov)

Listen to What Vladimir Putin Is Saying About Armenia

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Putin and other Kremlin insiders are threatening a hybrid warfare campaign to bring down Armenian leader Nikol Pashinyan. The Trump administration should back him up.

For years before Russia invaded Ukraine, Western leaders reassured themselves that longtime Russian President Vladimir Putin was merely posturing. The consensus held that Russia’s all-out propaganda blitz—talking heads on state TV denying Ukrainian sovereignty, calls for referendums in the east, and warnings of Euro-Atlantic encroachment—was empty political posturing and was not meant literally. Even weeks before the invasion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, now rightly remembered as a stalwart hero of Ukraine’s defense, insisted that Russia’s threats to invade were mere rhetoric. Until they were not.

The same vocabulary is now being aimed at Armenia, and last week, Putin took it on himself. Days after Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan explicitly announced that Armenia was not Russia’s ally in the war on Ukraine, Putin warned that the country is “now living through everything that is happening on the Ukrainian track”—a path that began with Ukraine’s move toward the EU and ended in “the coup d’état, the Crimea story, the position of southeastern Ukraine, and military actions.” As an alternative, Putin proposed an overt referendum on whether Armenia should break with Russia, followed by “a soft, civilized, and mutually beneficial separation.”

The threat behind Putin’s words could not have been clearer. Even so, others within his orbit went a step further. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova alleged that Yerevan had been drawn into an “anti-Russian orbit” by the European Union—the same framing of Euro-Atlantic encroachment into the historical Russian sphere of influence that the Kremlin used to justify its war on Ukraine. Not to be outdone, Russian state propagandist Vladimir........

© The National Interest