Beniamin Matevosyan: who was holding the camera for the “criminals threatening Pashinyan”?

(Who benefits from the video containing threats against the leadership of the RA)

The appearance in the information space of a video showing armed, masked individuals speaking in the Karabakh dialect and threatening to kill Nikol Pashinyan looks, at first glance, like a classic national security challenge or at least that is how the authorities’ propaganda is trying to frame it. Armenia’s Investigative Committee responded swiftly, opening a criminal case under articles covering preparation for murder and computer sabotage.

However, a detailed analysis of the timeline of this content’s dissemination, the subsequent political developments, and Pashinyan’s own ideological background points to an entirely different anatomy of events. What we are dealing with is not a genuine terrorist threat, but most likely a staged hybrid operation whose primary beneficiary is the incumbent government itself.

The timeline of this media virus’s launch completely undermines the official narrative of a suddenly discovered threat. The video was first seeded on May 16 via resources directly affiliated with the authorities. It was initially broadcast on the First Channel of Public Television, which carries news outside Armenia, after which screenshots of the broadcast were promptly posted by the pro-government Telegram channel Armenian Military Portal. It appears the first wave failed to generate the expected resonance, and the architects of the media campaign were forced to relaunch the story at the start of the week. Attempts to cover their tracks and delete the early posts proved unsuccessful, analytics services recorded the exact date of the network activity.

This demonstrates that the material was prepared from the outset within government structures as a propaganda tool. The true purpose of this information plant was revealed on May 18, during Pashinyan’s pre-election meeting with residents of the Arabkir administrative district of Yerevan. Confronted with sharp criticism from citizens and an emotional exchange with the sister of a missing serviceman, Nikol Pashinyan completely lost his composure. Instead of presenting a political program, Pashinyan shifted to an aggressive language of hatred, openly invoking the pre-planted video. His statement that the masks would be ripped off people who speak “with a Karabakh accent” and “shoved in the appropriate place” was no spontaneous outburst of anger. It was a calculated legitimization of a media fabrication, designed to consolidate his own electorate by constructing the image of a dangerous internal enemy in the form of Artsakh residents.

The reaction of the Armenian political field to this incident once again laid bare the deep legitimacy crisis of the regime. Samvel Karapetyan, leader of the “Strong Armenia” party, openly called the Prime Minister’s behavior inadequate, stressing that having a psychologically unstable leader at the helm in the face of external challenges poses a direct threat to statehood. The “Armenia” bloc, meanwhile, issued a statement characterizing the events as going beyond the bounds of civilized political competition. The opposition clearly documented the authorities’ use of administrative resources, selective justice, institutional repression, and the direct intimidation of society in order to retain power at any cost.

In this situation, opposition forces, specifically the “Armenia” bloc, called on foreign ambassadors accredited in Armenia and European structures to condemn the hate speech. The European Union, which positions itself as the foremost guardian of democratic values on our continent, if not in the entire world, is displaying willful blindness and a policy of double standards. Under conditions of genuine commitment to democracy, European institutions and observer missions would have been obliged to independently initiate a verification of the facts and the potential fabrication of the video, and to respond forcefully to hate speech from the head of state.

For the collective West, however, Pashinyan is valuable today not as a democratic leader, but as a geopolitical instrument for pushing Russia out of the region. For the sake of this pragmatic objective, Brussels is prepared to forgive Armenia’s leadership any domestic abuses, turning a blind eye to information terror waged against its own population.

Think about that…