The Hybrid Threat Within and the Washington Accords: The Disinformation Virus

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The persistent hybrid threats faced by Armenia in specifically the last four years are a combination of two primary factors: Azerbaijan’s implementation of its broader hybrid warfare toolkit and Russia’s initiation of an expansive information war campaign since Armenia’s Western pivot. While Armenian society, and the broader global Armenian nation, has been resilient and quite methodical in debunking and rejecting Azerbaijan’s disinformation campaign, such has not been the case with the more intricate and nuanced disinformation onslaught orchestrated by Moscow. In the domain of the former, the dissemination of the disinformation is targeted at the global community, designed to tarnish Armenia’s image, and in this context, the misinformation “herd immunity” that the Armenian nation has developed vis-a-vis Azerbaijan has neutralized this hybrid threat. In the case of the latter, the target is not the international community, but the Armenian nation itself, and the design of Russia’s disinformation campaign relies on proliferation through three mechanisms: Russian proxy groups in Armenia, Diasporan factions loyal to such proxy groups, and the Kremlin’s broader subversion stratagem to destabilize Armenia. The synchronized operationalization of the information warfare initiated against the August 8 Washington Accords is a profound case study in how conspiracy theories, spurious analytics, speculative arguments, and well-organized talking points were methodically designed and simultaneously implemented in this disinformation campaign. The footsoldiers of this transnational campaign, however, were not Kremlin bots or Russian social media personalities, but rather, Russia-aligned factions in Armenia and their companions in the Diaspora.  

The matter at hand does not pertain to disagreements on policies, efficacy or competence of the government, or the right to criticize and hold the Armenian government accountable by the citizens of Armenia. Those are axiomatic and incontrovertible. There are, indeed, legitimate questions that can be posed about the Washington Accords, its implementation process, and the contours of the specific details that will define the entire endeavor. But disinformation campaigns are not, by virtue of their designs, operationalized to produce healthy public discourse or substantive intersocietal debate. On the contrary, disinformation campaigns are strategic weapons of hybridity specifically utilized to weaponize the very concepts of healthy criticism and debate to turn these concepts against the political culture of a given society. Utilizing mechanisms of plausible deniability with “traceless manipulation,” participants in disinformation campaigns masquerade as concerned members of the wider Armenian polity, while precisely weaponizing the agora of public debates within democracies against the democratic project itself. 

The Hybrid Campaign 

Three pro-Russia parties in Armenia proliferated three different sets of disinformation, which were then packaged as a conceptual argumentative framework utilized, interchangeably, by all three domestic actors. At the same time, the exact same talking points and argumentative framework was utilized in the Diaspora in a highly-synchronized social media blitz. Why does it matter that the three groups are categorized as pro-Russia parties and not simply opposition parties? Because their underlying opposition is precisely defined by the fact that this is a U.S.-led endeavor that weakens and contradicts Russia’s strategic interests in Armenia and the region. More to the point, regardless of the positive merits of the Washington Accords, the perspective of these three groups is that the U.S.-led normalization process strengthens the political capital of the current government, which they deem as agents of the West. In this context, it is the intrinsic Russophilia of their political and ideational paradigm, and not the dividends that August 8 offers Armenia, that defines their participation in the hybrid assault against the Washington Accords.   

The first group is composed of former-President Robert Kocharyan and his allies, who proliferated the main talking point that the pending Washington Accords, and the transit route agreed to with the United States, was a case of “extraterritoriality” and an abdication of Armenian sovereignty. Thus, the “sovereignty postulate” was disseminated by the Kocharyan faction, with Kocharyan’s former foreign minister Vartan Oskanian taking the lead in proliferating the misinformation. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), Kocharyan’s closest political ally, reinforced the “sovereignty postulate” by spreading the false claim that the Armenian government had handed over Syunik to the Americans.    

The second group is composed of the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA), with former-President Serzh Sargsyan advancing the “capitulation” argument. This argument contends that the agreements in the Washington Accords, ranging from the transit route project to the three bilateral memorandums of understanding signed between Armenia and the United States, are performative documents designed to conceal Armenia’s capitulation and abdication to Baku. The ARF, former junior party within Sargsyan’s Government prior to the Velvet Revolution, and currently a coalition partner with the RPA, married the “capitulation” postulate with the unfounded claim that Armenia has secretly made “further territorial concessions” to Azerbaijan.

The third group is composed of the ARF in Armenia along with its various branches in the Diaspora, specifically its political advocacy network. The political advocacy network is organized under the umbrella of the Armenian National Committee (ANC), with each country having its own chapter, the objective of which is to advocate the policy and ideological goals of the ARF. The more prominent ANC branch is the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), which remains the ARF’s most important instrument of information proliferation in the Diaspora. The ARF, while advancing the disinformation spread by the Kocharyan faction and Sargsyan’s RPA, has also produced two sets of its own talking points: the “hidden Turkish hand” postulate and the “Iran threat” postulate. The “hidden Turkish hand” postulate was extensively spread in ARF circles, while the “Iran threat” postulate, which was itself debunked by Tehran, was vigorously spread both in Armenia and the Diaspora. In essence, the packaging of the entire disinformation toolkit was done through the ARF’s transnational network, designed to not only misinform the Diaspora, but also to sow fear: Turks are taking over southern Armenia and relations with Iran are being ruptured.     

That all of these talking points and argumentation frameworks were simultaneously disseminated in a highly-organized and synchronized fashion begs the question: why were the three pro-Russia groups in Armenia so vigorously advancing false narratives on developments before details were released, and subsequently, once details were released that debunked all of their claims, why did the ANCA articulate the entirety of the talking points into a disinformation packet and engage in a social media blitz through the Diaspora?    

The Washington Accords are not flawless, of course there are limitations and areas of perceived shortcomings, but interpreting developments, engaging the facts, and qualifying the state of affairs is not the same as preemptively seeking to shape false narratives prior to any substantive information having been released. More to the point, when the released information debunks and discredits the misinformation spread to the broader Armenian polity, the endeavor of doubling-down on such false claims, or simply disappearing from the discourse, demonstrates the operational scope and strategic objective of the targeted disinformation campaign. In essence, the contours of such an endeavor remain acutely part of advancing the hybrid threat against Armenia. 

When the details of the Washington Accords were released, and as developments proceeded subsequently, all the claims of “loss of sovereignty,” “extraterritoriality,” “capitulation,” “further territorial concession,” the “hidden Turkish hand,” and “rupturing of Iran-Armenia relations” proved to be categorical lies. Factually speaking, none of these claims were true before the Washington Accords, and they remained untrue after the details of the summit were released. Whether one is happy with what Armenia got or not, whether one is marginally approving but still upset, or whether one is concerned and pessimistic about how the Accords will play out, all of that can well be the case, but none of that changed the fact that the information spread by the pro-Russia proxies were fundamentally false. 

To mitigate for the collective failure of the disinformation campaign, at least in Armenia, and to maintain the “misinformation virus,” the three groups, but especially the Kocharyan-ARF tandem, resorted to conspiracy theories and conspiratorial arguments. Not only is this unsurprising, it is actually “normal” according to the scholarship on misinformation and conspiratorial thinking. To more cogently understand the anatomy of the disinformation campaign unleashed against Armenia, and specifically, the hybrid threat from within, the large body of scholarship on the subject becomes quite instructive. 

The Mis/Dis-information Virus

Research demonstrates that disinformation campaigns are designed to be preemptive in order to influence people’s “episodic memory,” which is primarily defined by the first wave of information absorption, thus “infecting” memory representation with “the misinformation virus.” False narratives, in this context, become pertinent because they reproduce “continued-influence effect,” namely, even if the tenets of the false narrative are debunked by the evidence, the misinformation virus continues to survive, even if somewhat diminished. One important research project showed that whether individuals process a particular claim as true or not is strongly predicated by how well the individual recalls the initial claim. This is particularly the case in the Diaspora, where much of the English-language information space is primarily dominated by the ARF or ARF-affiliated outlets. Nonetheless, in the case of the disinformation campaign against the Washington Accords, the claims on sovereignty, extraterritoriality, Iran, or capitulation did not take root, while the misinformation on the “hidden Turkish hand” and possibility of some form of “concessions” continue to persist. Why has this been the case? The latter two postulates have been developed in the Diaspora information ecosystem for a much longer period of time, as such, the incubation period for these “misinformation pathogens” have been substantively longer.  

So, how does the disinformation developed by political operatives become widespread misinformation absorbed by the average Diasporan consumer of social media? Scholars analogously apply a key metric in epidemiology, the basic reproduction number (RO), or the infectiousness of a virus, to trace the spread of misinformation. When observing misinformation pathogens, RO represents the number of individuals that post fake news following contact with someone who is already posting misinformation (the infectious individual). The “infectious period,” which is the time span during which people are “contagious and actively share content,” is the height of infectiousness during disinformation campaigns. During the Washington Accords onslaught, the infectious period was from August 4 to August 9, as the Kocharyan faction domestically and the ARF-ANCA faction in the Diaspora engaged in frantic social media campaigns, proliferations of fake news, publication of articles, and specifically in the case of the ANCA, an intense two-days of frenzied spamming.    

One prominent technique used by the ARF-ANCA faction in English-language social network platforms is the “rumor cascade,” where infectious accounts make a claim off of a video, photo, or link to an article, and the post cascades with shares and reshares by asymptomatic users that get swept up in the misinformation avalanche. This was precisely how the “abdication of sovereignty” postulate, for example, was spread, as an article by Vartan Oskanian was shared by “infectious” accounts associated with or part of the ARF-ANCA ecosystem, thus creating a rumor cascade. Contextually speaking, this was a unique case, considering the fact that Oskanian was foreign minister during a period in Armenia’s history where the Kocharyan administration abdicated much of Armenia’s infrastructure, energy, and security to Russia. Similarly, while the ARF-ANCA faction proliferated Oskanian’s falsehoods on sovereignty, ARF is a coalition partner with Kocharyan and the ANCA staunchly supported Kocharyan’s Armenia Coalition in the 2021 elections, even after Kocharyan publicly declared his support for Armenia joining a union-state, very much like Belarus, with Russia. In essence, those perpetuating the rumor cascade on loss of sovereignty were the same actors that have consistently abdicated Armenia’s sovereignty to Russia. So, if the source of the rumor cascade had severe credibility problems, why did the misinformation continue to infect? Research shows that falsehoods diffuse significantly faster and more broadly than true claims in all categories of information, and considering the fact that more people share and reshare false claims than true claims, the spread of false news is aided by a viral process. Thus, falsehoods are 70% more likely to be shared and reshared than true claims. 

Echo Chambers as Hybrid Instruments 

Social media echo chambers are digital ecosystems where beliefs and opinions are amplified and reinforced within a relatively closed media system. The Kocharyan-ARF tandem have an echo chamber that is mostly in Armenian-language platforms, while the ARF-ANCA faction primarily utilizes English-language accounts. Since the spread of misinformation on social media is studied epidemiologically, the misinformation is the virus and echo chambers deemed the perfect host get furosemide. Echo chambers dampen the “immune response” of members and become hotbeds of replication, as they lead to selective exposure and selective retention of information. When observing the ARF-ANCA echo chamber, the spread of misinformation is not only designed to fuel confirmation bias, but in some cases, produce radicalization. 

In this context, the spread of misinformation through the ARF-ANCA echo chamber undergoes a rapid viral process because of the confirmation bias in this information space: Armenia’s government is treasonous or evil and everything it does must be unquestionably opposed and attacked. In of itself, this does not create any hybrid threats for Armenia, except for cases where radicalized members call for the death or assassination of democratically-elected leaders. But more acutely, the incubation of disinformation in the ARF-ANCA echo chamber becomes a hybrid threat when “rumor cascades” are designed to target American lawmakers or lawmakers and officials in other countries. Further, the misinformation spread by the ANCA throughout the Diaspora seeks to detach the asymptomatic user from the Republic of Armenia or turn them against the Armenian state by using the same misinformation pathogens that have worked with members of its echo chamber. 

Whether these endeavors are successful or not, and in the case of the former it has been a complete failure while in the case of the latter has created a great deal of confusion among Diasporans, such is besides the point. Rather, the underlying point is that a pro-Russia faction is actively working in the Diaspora against the interests of the Armenian Republic, and more so, it is seeking to harm Armenia’s relations with the most powerful country in the world. To this end, it is not a question of whether such campaigns will succeed or fail, for in all reality, the failure of such endeavors is a foregone conclusion. Rather, these are attempts to force Armenia to divert its already-limited resources in the information warfare away from the Russia and Azerbaijan front and apply it to the Diaspora. As such, the hybrid threat within is a low-cost instrument for Russia to expand the information war against Armenia, with the ARF-ANCA faction seeking to open a third front.  

That the severe shortcomings in the Armenian government’s strategic communication capabilities, and the exceedingly slow pace in the implementation of its comprehensive security doctrine, have compounded the problem remain quite clear and a continuous cause for concern. While important de-hybridization and resilience efforts are continuously being built, these are not enough to allow the state the strategic capacity of pre-empting and immediately mitigating such transnational disinformation campaigns against the Republic. And while the Washington Accords were too complex of a development for any disinformation campaign to disrupt, such will not be the case with the upcoming 2026 parliamentary elections. To borrow from the old adage, “A lie is halfway around the world before truth has put its shoes on.” Perhaps Armenia should start putting its shoes on…knowing full well what lies ahead.   

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