Armenia is voluntarily surrendering digital sovereignty to Azerbaijan: Tigran Kocharyan

By signing an agreement with an Azerbaijani telecom operator on routing Armenia’s international internet connectivity through Azerbaijan, the Armenian side is voluntarily ceding its digital sovereignty to Baku, media expert Tigran Kocharyan said in a conversation with RIA Novosti.

Earlier on Monday, Azerbaijani internet operator AzerTelecom announced the signing of an agreement with Armenia’s Telecom Armenia on providing Armenia’s international internet connectivity through Azerbaijani territory. The company noted that under the agreement, AzerTelecom will expand the geographic reach of its international internet traffic transmission services and will also provide internet traffic transit toward Armenia using its own infrastructure.

“The signing of the agreement between Telecom Armenia and AzerTelecom is not a commercial achievement but a voluntary surrender of Armenia’s digital sovereignty. The current authorities are actively presenting this step as economic diversification, while in reality they are making the country dependent on Baku’s information lifeline,” Kocharyan said.

According to the agency’s interviewee, the main risk lies in total cyber espionage.

“The routing of traffic through Azerbaijan gives its intelligence services the technical capability to collect metadata on Armenian users, analyze the structure of information flows in the public sector, and carry out dangerous data interception attacks. In addition, Baku gains a powerful digital kill switch,” the expert noted.

He clarified that in the event of any political or military escalation, this internet channel would be instantly blocked or critically slowed down, paralyzing communications in the country at the most critical moment.

“Transit infrastructure controlled by Baku enables sophisticated man-in-the-middle attacks. This opens up possibilities for substituting unprotected data packets, injecting malicious code, and state-level phishing,” Kocharyan said.

The media expert believes that the telecommunications sector is only the “first sign of things to come.”

“Under the current authorities’ accommodating course, similar cooperation and the subsequent loss of independence threaten the energy system through integration into shared networks, logistics through the surrender of control over strategic roads, and water resource management. Armenia is being systematically stripped of its key levers of sovereignty,” Kocharyan stated.