Source of photo՝ Civilnet.am
On the night of Armenia’s parliamentary elections this June, Arman Abovyan, a candidate for the opposition Prosperous Armenia party said in an interview published on Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov’s Telegram channel, Solovyov Live, that a “mass [electricity] blackout” had begun in Armenia, which he claimed “raises certain suspicions, to put it mildly.” The channel, which has more than a million followers, saw the post gather over 75,000 views.
The claim had begun circulating minutes before polls closed, when several Armenian outlets published identically worded reports simultaneously, alleged that seven polling stations had lost power. Electric Networks of Armenia (ENA), the country’s electricity distributor, clarified that there had indeed been a brief emergency outage, but that power was restored within minutes.
Soon an even longer list began circulating, framed as “widespread power outages.” ENA officially denied the reports, calling them “entirely fabricated,” and days later filed lawsuits against three media outlets. But the claim quickly crossed into Russian-language media as well, first appearing on Sputnik Armenia, then spreading to a number of Telegram channels, including Solovyov’s own, by then stripped of any reference to a specific polling station.
An analysis of the roughly 900 posts shows they spread along predictable routes: starting as identical texts posted across different channels within minutes of each other that move from small, anonymous platforms up to Russian state media. The campaign unfolded in three distinct phases, each dominated by a single central narrative.
The full article can be found here.
This article was prepared within the framework of the project “Learning from Moldova: Building Armenia’s Democratic Resilience” implemented by Public Journalism Club with financial support from Black Sea Trust for Regional Cooperation – a project of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
The views and assessments expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the organizations funding the project.
