How CivilNetCheck tracked the "stolen election" narrative on Telegram

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.

This chain of spreading the “mass blackout” claim, however, was not an isolated case. In the weeks before and after the vote, Russian-language Telegram channels repeatedly circulated various narratives casting doubt on the election results. CivilNetCheck examined nearly 900 such posts to determine how this distribution network operates.

Three phases, one network

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.

In the run-up to the election, the channels under review were dominated by three narratives: that “Armenia is under external control,” that “the West and the EU are destroying Armenia,” and that “the authorities are repressing the opposition.” On election day itself, the “rigged election” narrative moved to the forefront, its volume growing roughly tenfold within a single day. After the Central Election Commission (CEC) confirmed the final results on June 14, this narrative began to fade, and the “external control” theme resurfaced.

The chart below tracks the volume of the three narratives — “rigged election,” “external control,” and “repression” — by day in June, showing a sharp spike around June 7 followed by a decline.

A narrative ready in advance

In the final week before the vote, the dominant theme on the monitored channels was Armenia's rapprochement with the European Union, a shift Yerevan has pursued since relations with its traditional ally Russia soured over Moscow's failure to back Armenia during the 2021-2022 border incursions and its wars with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.

Pro-Kremlin channels framed the EU shift as a path to the country's “ruin.” On May 29, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Armenia, invoking the “Ukrainian scenario,” a reference to the war that followed Ukraine's own turn toward the EU and NATO. On June 2, State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said that Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan had “made a personal commitment to bring Armenia into the EU.” The day before the vote, on June 6, Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election, claiming that Pashinyan was trying to “eliminate all his rivals.”

Election day: the path of one fake claim

At 10 a.m. on June 7, Mika Badalyan, a council member of the Russian organization Evrazia, wrote on his Telegram channel that the election was “accompanied by a huge number of violations” and had been “rigged in every possible way” by Pashinyan. Evrazia’s election-interference activities in Moldova and Armenia were documented by CivilNet and the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab in a previous joint investigation.

Another false claim originated with Russian state media. At midday, RT republished a story from Le Journal du Dimanche — a French Sunday newspaper whose editorial line has shifted sharply to the right under owner Vincent Bolloré, a backer of far-right politician Éric Zemmour. Reuters has also reported on changes at the paper under Bolloré’s ownership. The story claimed that French intelligence services were secretly helping Armenian authorities block online criticism. The claim was quickly picked up by RIA Novosti and TASS as well. At the same time, it was put into circulation by channels operating within the Telegram network.

Le Journal du Dimanche had indeed published such an article. An archived version from June 7 contained a passage about VIGINUM, the French state agency that monitors foreign digital interference, and about online “purges,” but two days later that passage had been removed by the editors. The propaganda network, however, continued spreading the unsubstantiated claim. In the fake version being circulated, VIGINUM was cast as a “censorship” body — when in fact it is the French state agency that exposed Russia's Pravda propaganda network, a set of more than 150 clone websites impersonating Western media outlets under their own names.

After the election: the 'Moldovan scenario'

Samvel Karapetyan, leader of the pro-Russian Strong Armenia alliance, said on the night of the vote count that the Central Election Commission had allegedly halted the count “after seeing their [the ruling party's — ed.] results dropping in embarrassing fashion.” The propaganda network quickly folded this claim into the “Moldovan scenario” narrative that had already been circulating for months, a reference to Russia-linked efforts to portray Moldova's 2024 pro-EU presidential election and referendum as fraudulent.

Political scientist Artur Khachikyan advanced the narrative further, writing on June 9: “The count was halted overnight, and the results were fabricated by morning.” Within minutes, his post was reposted by Armenian Kaleidoscope, Artsakh 44 (a reference to Artsakh, the Armenian name for Nagorno-Karabakh), Vneshny Vrag (“External Enemy”), Yerevan.Today, Parallel, and a number of other channels.

A network graph of cross-reposting among the 31 Telegram channels studied shows the links between them: each circle represents one channel, and the thickness of the connecting lines shows how often they repeated each other's content.

In the days following the vote, the “Moldovan scenario” narrative became the network's dominant theme, spreading through nearly 100 posts in just two days. “At least 20 percent [of the vote] was stolen from the opposition,” State Duma deputy Viktor Vodolatsky told TASS, with Badalyan's channel circulating the claim as “Russia's position.” On June 14, the pro-Kremlin channel Rybar, which has about 1.5 million followers, shared a post from the channel Kavkazar claiming that Armenia had “succeeded in replicating the Moldovan scenario.”

On June 8, Meduza reported that the Kremlin had instructed Russian state and pro-Kremlin media to frame Pashinyan's party winning under 50 percent of the vote as a “loss” — staff were specifically told to use that word — and to emphasize election violations in order to “sow doubts about the legitimacy” of the result. The same talking points surfaced at the official level too: Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova warned of “unprecedented pressure on the opposition” and unprecedented Western interference, while Ella Pamfilova, head of Russia's Central Election Commission, claimed that Russian observers had recorded “fundamental violations.” CivilNetCheck examined this claim separately in another article.

As the “rigged election” narrative faded, Moscow revived the “external control” theme. On June 28, Medvedev declared that Western interference in the electoral process had been “unprecedented” and that Armenia's state apparatus had been placed under “manual control.” Within two hours, the claim was repeated by RIA Novosti, RT, and eight other channels.

Who is behind the channels

The two narratives that drew the largest audiences — that “the arrests are repression” and that “Armenia is under external control” — were driven not by Armenian channels but by Russian state media and million-follower aggregators: RT, RIA Novosti, Rybar, and Readovka. Over the period studied, the first narrative racked up more than eight million views, and the second more than seven million.

The chart below shows the distribution of post views by channel, comparing Russian state media and pro-Kremlin propaganda channels with channels operating in Armenia's own information space.

The administrators of most of the Telegram channels reviewed that operate in Armenia's information space remain unknown: Armenian Vendetta, Tsitsak, Comrade General, Yerevan Observer, and other frequent source channels do not disclose who runs them. The central figure of the local network, however, is known: Badalyan's channel is the largest of them, with more than 30,000 subscribers. A joint investigation by CivilNet and the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) documented Badalyan's involvement in various projects tied to official Moscow.

Another mechanism at work in the network was “independent expertise.” Analyses of the Armenian election were circulated by Garnik Tumanyan and Dmitry Matyushenkov, both members of the Digoriya club — a Kremlin-backed platform for young experts.

Tumanyan is deputy head of a department at the Expert Institute for Social and Economic Research (EISI), an organization founded on the initiative of Sergei Kiriyenko, the Russian presidential administration's first deputy chief of staff, and considered one of the administration's main expert platforms. EISI also organizes the Digoriya forum. Content presented as “independent analysis,” in other words, is in fact directly tied to the Kremlin.

The research shows that the campaign's impact on Armenian-language media was limited, but that within the Russian-language information space it operated in a coordinated way, with the same narratives moving quickly from small anonymous channels to Russian state media and million-follower platforms. After the election, the network continued to operate, simply switching to new dominant narratives.