DISINFO: Goal of US-Armenia partnership is destabilisation of South Caucasus
SUMMARY
On January 14, Armenia and the United States concluded a strategic partnership agreement during the working visit of Armenia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ararat Mirzoyan, to Washington. The goal is the destabilisation of the South Caucasus. Previously, the US established similar strategic partnership charters with Ukraine in 2008 and Georgia in 2009. In 2021, the US-Ukraine charter was updated ahead of Washington turning the Ukraine conflict into its proxy war against Russia. The US-Georgia partnership was suspended in November 2024 after the Georgian ruling party implemented policies prioritising national sovereignty, which diverged from US interests.
RESPONSE
This is a mix of several recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narratives about encircling and destabilising Russia, colour revolutions and the war in Ukraine as a proxy conflict against Russia.
The goal of the US-Armenia Strategic Partnership is to improve cooperation between these two countries in several key areas, including in the economic, security and defense areas; strengthen democracy, justice, and inclusion; and increase people-to-people exchanges. However, Russia perceives these independent actions by former Soviet states as a threat to what it considers its ‘sphere of influence’, aggressively targeting these international exchanges and trying to discredit them by baselessly portraying them as part of a plot against Russia.
Claims about Ukraine as a Western proxy war are an attempt to deflect Russia’s responsibility for its brutal and unprovoked aggression against its neighbour (see here, here and here for full debunking of this allegation).
The decisions adopted by the Georgian government mentioned in this disinformation story are not intended to “prioritize national sovereignty”, but an erosion of democratic standards and a series of authoritarian moves, specifically the approval of the so-called ‘Foreign Agents' law, which critics say mirrors a 2012 law in Russia used to crack down on dissent and suppress NGOs and media, and which could be used to restrict freedom of expression and association. The European Union considers this legislation incompatible with the democratic standards required to become a EU member. When large swaths of the Georgian population protested these and other measures, they have been met with police brutality and repression. Nonetheless, these protests have been regularly described by pro-Kremlin outlets as a Western-led ‘colour revolution’.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives, such as claims that the West is forcing post-Soviet states to choose between "Russia or the West", that the US wants to turn Armenia into an anti-Russian stronghold, that the collective West does not abandon attempts to destabilise the South Caucasus, that the EU punishes Georgia for being independent and not Russophobic enough, or that Armenia needs to be wary of the West which is specialised in colour revolutions.