After a two-month war in 2020 between Azerbaijan and Armenia, it was Russia that brokered a ceasefire. Since Russia is currently preoccupied, there has been an opening for the EU and the U.S. to play peacemaker.

Although Vladimir Putin may no longer be calling the shots, the consequences of his decision to go to war with Ukraine are reverberating through the region. In July, the EU signed a memorandum with Azerbaijan to double exports of gas to the bloc by 2027, in order to help the EU wean itself off Russian fossil fuels.

The deal has emboldened President Ilham Aliyev to use his newly found leverage to step up a crackdown on dissent in Azerbaijan, while the EU looks away. 

The government in Azerbaijan blocked access to TikTok on several service providers as early as 14 September, possibly to stop the proliferation of a video that allegedly shows a female Armenian soldier being mutilated by Azerbaijani forces. Videos like this from the frontline are likely why TikTok has remained widely blocked since then, according to data collected from a monitoring app run by the Open Observatory of Network Interference, an organization that documents internet censorship around the world.

During the 2020 war Aliyev’s government shut down several social media sites. This even though support for the war was widespread, according to several Azerbaijanis I spoke to, including the prominent journalist Mehman Huseynov.

Huseynov believes that this time around attitudes have changed. Online opposition to the war has increased. One activist, Ahmad Mammadli, was arrested and then sentenced to 30 days in jail after writing some scathing tweets about the conflict. 

Even before the recent violence though, a journalist was sentenced to prison in July for defamation. Some human rights organizations and Huseynov believe the journalist was targeted for reporting on a high profile case in which Azerbaijani military personnel have been accused of torturing fellow soldiers.

Ramute Remezaite, a Senior Legal Consultant at the European Human Rights Advocacy Center, dates Aliyev’s crackdown on criticism to 2014, with the EU’s increasing reliance on Azerbaijani gas emboldening Aliyev’s regime to disregard international law with impunity. She is currently working on filing a complaint to the European Court of Human Rights against the Azerbaijani state on behalf of twenty people targeted by the Pegasus spyware.

“I remember when that crackdown started in 2014,” Remezaite told me, “our Russian colleagues would say, ‘Oh, we hope Russia doesn't get to where Azerbaijan is.’”

The picture in Azerbaijan is in stark contrast to Armenia, which is a democracy whose patience with its longtime authoritarian protector, Russia, seems to be wearing thin. That said, TikTok in Armenia was temporarily blocked during the September clashes. This has left some, such as Artur Papyan who co-founded an organization called CYBERHub-AM that provides IT support to Armenian civil society, feeling worried that in the face of a hostile authoritarian neighbor the little democracy might be tempted to use some of the same tools.

IN GLOBAL NEWS:

Vietnam is taking steps to exert more control over news and information online. The government is preparing new rules to limit which social media account can post news-related content, according to recent reporting. Hanoi — which already enforces strict censorship laws — is aiming to establish a legal basis for controlling news dissemination on platforms like Facebook and YouTube. The new rules are still being finalized and are expected to be announced by the end of the year. As we recently reported, the Indonesian government has also moved to limit free speech online, turning the country into one of the world’s most repressive internet regimes.

Got Musk whiplash? You’re not alone. The Tesla CEO grabbed headlines last week after he proclaimed he would buy Twitter, after all — at the original price of $44 billion — after a months-long saga over the deal. With the U.S. midterms in less than a month, much of the conversation has focused on what Musk taking the helm could mean for the elections, especially if he moves to reinstate former Donald Trump’s account ahead of the elections. But, as Coda editor Ellery Biddle explained last April, adapting Musk’s free speech absolutism to Twitter could play out dangerously in countries vulnerable to violence and civil unrest. “We have real world consequences from the kind of speech that Twitter enables,” an India-based tech expert told her. “Our political parties are really, really adept at understanding how the algorithms work, how to create trends, how to make something shareable. What they excel at is essentially fueling hate.”

Journalists and activists in Mexico are still being targeted with Pegasus spyware. According to a new blockbuster report by the Mexican digital rights group R3D, the phones of at least three journalists and activists were infected with Pegasus from 2019-2021. The use of Pegasus in Mexico was first uncovered in 2017 under former President Enrique Pena Nieto, whose government used the technology to spy on journalists and activists. Since taking office in 2018, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has repeatedly declared his opposition to the practice and vowed that it would end under his administration. The latest revelations call Lopez Obrador’s promises into question. “This implies the possibility of two scenarios,” the digital rights group Article 19 said in a statement. “The first is that the President lied to the people of Mexico. The second, that the armed forces are spying behind the President’s back and disobeying the direct order of their Supreme Commander.”

WHAT WE’RE READING

The White House recently unveiled an AI Bill of Rights that it claims will protect Americans from the discriminatory use of artificial intelligence and other abuses. But the proposal is drawing heat from experts, who say it’s “toothless against big tech.” Wired has more.

This newsletter is curated by Coda’s staff reporter Erica Hellerstein. Liam Scott contributed to this edition.

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A historical dispute between Armenia and Russia over Armenia’s liberation-hero-turned-Nazi-collaborator has reignited, injecting tendentious World War II politics into the two allies’ uneasy relationship.

A senior Russian lawmaker wrote a piece in the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta, published February 6, headlined “The Return of Nazism from the Baltics to Armenia.” The theme is not a new one for Russia, which has in recent years made great efforts to delegitimize nationalist fighters who collaborated with Germany in World War II in the cause of liberating their countries from Soviet rule.

But while that has become an old story in the Baltics and Ukraine, it’s a new one in Armenia. Armenia, unlike those other states, is a close ally of Russia and until recently has been spared criticism for its heroes’ dabbling in Nazi collaboration.

That may now be changing. “Armenia, a strategic ally of Russia, has erected a monument in the center of Yerevan to the Third Reich collaborationist Garegin Nzhdeh,” the lawmaker, Lyudmila Kozlova, wrote. Nzhdeh, she wrote, “has the blood of thousands of our grandfathers and great grandfathers on his hands.”

That followed an event in January at Russia’s Duma, a roundtable discussion on “The Fight Against Valorization of Nazism and the Return of Neo-Nazism: Legislative Aspects,” at which the participants called on Armenia to take down the statue of Nzhdeh, which was put up in 2016.

These salvoes reopened a battle that appeared to have resulted in a ceasefire last year, when a Russian military television station aired a program making many of the same allegations against Nzhdeh. After Armenia vociferously complained that time, Russia quickly backed down, removed the program from the TV station’s website and issued an apology. This time, though, the accusations are coming from higher up the power structure, and Russia has not apologized.

Nzhdeh, like any other historical figure, is complex. Over a period of decades, he fought all Armenia’s foes, including Ottoman Turkey and early Soviet Russia, and is credited in Armenia for his efforts in securing Zangezur, the southernmost part of Armenia, which the Soviets had wanted to award to Azerbaijan. But when World War II broke out, Nzhdeh threw his lot in with Germany, offering Germany his assistance and providing evidence that the Armenians were an Aryan people.

Ideally, an assessment of Nzhdeh’s legacy would take all of that into account. But there’s no room for nuance in the black-and-white, zero-sum game of post-Soviet World War II politics. And the attack on Nzhdeh was parried vigorously by Armenians across the political spectrum.

Eduard Sharmazanov, the spokesman for the ruling Republican Party of Armenia, used one of Russia’s favorite tactics against it: whataboutism. “To those who attempt to tie Nzhdeh to fascists, I respond: if someone collaborated with fascists, then so did the entire Soviet leadership led by Molotov and Stalin from 1933-41 with the non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany led by Adolf Hitler,” he said.

“Of course, neither will Russians be able to take down the monument of Nzhdeh, nor will we be able to bury Lenin from Yerevan, but at least in Russia they should realize that it will not be possible to return to the regime under which the Armenian people suffered,” added pro-Western opposition politician Stepan Safaryan.

Foreign Minister Eduard Nalbandian implied that Armenia’s foe, Azerbaijan, was pulling the strings behind the scenes. “This is speculation from several enemies, and their reasons are completely obvious. This is being done intentionally, and it is not worth falling into the trap,” he said.

Azerbaijan’s traces can in fact be found behind some of the anti-Nzhdeh movement from Russia. But not all. “Notice that in the Kozlova case, our leadership can not claim that we’re dealing with some ‘experts’ or personal opinions, because the upper chamber the Russian parliament [in which Kozlova serves] is made of people who have been ‘filtered’ several times before reaching the Kremlin, where the candidates are examined with a microscope,” one worried commentator, Sargis Artsruni, wrote. “The Russians clearly don’t have a problem with Gagerin Nzhdeh, or with his monument, but with [President] Serzh Sargsyan and the Republican Party of Armenia.”

Most of the rebuttals did not attempt to justify Nzhdeh’s collaboration with the Nazis. But the anti-Russian-propaganda website run by the pro-Western NGO Union of Informed Citizens and funded by the European Union, sut.am, went there.

“First of all, we should note that the [Nzhdeh-led unit] Armenian Legion was part of Wehrmacht, and not SS,” the Union wrote, in bold contravention of the rule of thumb that if you start to argue about the precise nature of Nazi collaboration, you’ve pretty much lost the argument. They went on: “Few people know that the aim of the creation of the Armenian Legion in the Wehrmacht was mitigation of the Turkish threat.”

Meanwhile, the Nzhdeh fight is set to become further internationalized: a statue of the controversial hero is to be erected in Bulgaria. Buckle up.

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But what Armenia also needed was help modernizing its dairy industry, which was still reliant on old production methods and quality control procedures. A deal with the EU, Gigoyan believed, would have been the answer. “With our natural gifts, then we could have been able to compete in Europe.”

Just before he was due to sign the deal, however, President Serzh Sargsyan announced that he had changed his mind — clearly influenced by Russia — and would instead pursue Eurasian Union membership. And Armenia joined in 2014, just a day after the union was created.

Armenia’s economic ties with Russia were already close. It exports nearly all its cheese there, for example. So in some ways, Eurasian Union membership has had little economic impact. And some believe that signing the EU deal would have meant a lot more pain than its backers acknowledge, as Armenia complied with tougher European quality-control measures and other codes.

But Sargsyan’s last minute about-turn didn’t give him a chance to follow Kyrgyzstan’s example and make sure Armenia got the best deal. “No one had a chance to bargain, to get advantages for their business,” said Artak Manukyan, president of Armenia’s Small and Medium Enterprises Cooperation Association. “It was a very bad deal.”

What’s more, by opting for the Eurasian Union, Armenia has yoked its fate even more tightly to Russia’s. And still struggling under sanctions and low oil prices, the Russian economy remains more of an anchor than an engine. “Both the [EU deal] and the Eurasian Union would have hurt in the short term,” Manukyan said. “But at least with the EU there was a potential for a positive future.” President Sargsyan’s last minute about-turn didn’t give him a chance to follow Kyrgyzstan’s example and make sure Armenia got the best deal.

Armenia is in a difficult position. Still locked in conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno Karabakh — which it conquered from its neighbour in the 1990s — it relies on Russian military aid to hang on to the disputed territory. And Moscow delivered a timely reminder of its power as the EU deal was being negotiated in 2013, announcing plans to sell billions of dollars worth of arms to Azerbaijan — which quickly prompted Sargsyan’s about face.

The result though is that Armenia is the country least satisfied with Eurasian Union membership, according to survey data from the Eurasian Development Bank, with fewer than half of Armenian respondents viewing it positively.

Armenia has tried to maintain economic ties with Europe, and last year it signed a “Partnership and Cooperation Agreement” with the EU. But it was significantly watered down compared to the deal the government had been on the cusp of signing in 2013, with any clauses on free trade removed in deference to its EEU obligations and Russian concerns.

Russia made clear it would only allow the agreement to go ahead if it did not challenge the supremacy of the EEU deal. And in an interview, Armenia’s chief negotiator Garen Nazarian, admitted that the government had taken an “over-cautious” approach in talks with the EU, jokingly paraphrasing its position as: “We’ll do this with you, unless Russia tells us we don’t like it.”

Some pro-Western parliamentarians have tried to take a harder line, introducing legislation for Armenia to secede from the Eurasian Union. It had no chance of passing, but it did spur a public debate about the merits of membership. And some hope that may help President Sargsyan gain some traction with Moscow, to bargain for a better deal.

Additional reporting by Seda Hergnyan.

Illustrations by Aleksandra Krasutskaya.

This piece is produced by Coda Network — a collaboration of independent newsrooms. Its partners include Coda Story, Ukrayinska Pravda, Spektr.Press, Kloop and Hetq.

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DerGrigorian admits he’ll probably never know for sure who was trying to get into his accounts, but it fit perfectly into a bigger picture of suspicious activity that saturated Armenian cyber-space around the election and mirrors some of the election-related mischief in the U.S.

It started in late March when dozens of Russian-language profiles using the #armvote17 election hashtag began tweeting what they claimed to be an email from USAID, the development arm of the U.S. government. The letter expressed support for the opposition and implied that the U.S. was meddling in the Armenian election. “An NGO is trying to sabotage the vote,” many of the tweets read.

The U.S. embassy was quick to laugh the email off, pointing to numerous spelling mistakes and that it came from a Gmail account. “Recycled tricks and recycled lies. If you are going to lie, at least be creative about it,” the embassy wrote on its Facebook page. On March 29, a new version of the email with the mistakes corrected and Gmail address cropped out was shared on Pastebin, a website popular among coders for storing and sharing text.

An analysis by Ben Nimmo, a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Lab, found that dozens of Russian language accounts that shared the fake USAID email all had similar patterns of behavior, suggesting they are part of a coordinated group of bots. All of the accounts were created over a year ago, had few followers and repeatedly tweeted very similar phrases and images, often multiple times from the same profile.

While the accounts showed little previous activity, all of them had also tweeted during recent anti-corruption protests in Russia, using the protest’s hashtag to send irrelevant images and memes.

Armenian journalist Gegham Vardanyan believes the same bots not only spread fake news but also managed to trigger the suspension of four prominent twitter accounts in Armenia, including his. Three other suspended accounts belonged to two independent news outlets and the director of a pro-Western NGO.

Vardanyan and DerGrigorian say the attacks bear hallmarks of a Russian troll factory but neither can prove it. All four accounts were reinstated within two hours with the help of Access Now, a US-based nonprofit that defends “digital rights of users around the world.” Without their help, Vardanyan says it could have taken them days to get their accounts unblocked by going through Twitter’s own review procedure.

But the incident has highlighted the vulnerability of small Twitter markets to attacks and bots during significant political events. Similar suspensions of prominent bloggers in Ukraine have been attributed to coordinated attacks by bots, which are automated accounts that in this case sent multiple complaints about an account’s activity.

Twitter did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

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Legislation aimed at preventing domestic violence in Armenia has been scuttled after opponents charged that it is a European attempt to undermine traditional Armenian values.

The draft law, titled “Prevention of and the Struggle against Domestic Violence” was published in November on the website of the Ministry of Justice. The bill would have strengthened laws against domestic violence, and created mechanisms aimed at preventing it, as well as services for its victims. It was introduced as part of a European Union program, under which Armenia would be eligible for 11 million euros in aid, contingent on the country passing a law on domestic violence.

After an immediate outcry, the ministry withdrew the bill the next day, and promised to organize public discussions and elicit citizens’ feedback on the legislation.

“If we think that the Europeans woke up one day and became all of sudden very concerned about Armenian women, then we are gravely mistaken,” Arman Boshian, founder of the Pan-Armenian Parents’ Committee, said at a press conference. Boshian claimed that the bill was a “very dangerous” European attack on Armenian family values.

“The problem is that the issue of domestic violence is more pronounced in Europe. The main aim of the project is the penetration into family, and shattering the traditional roots of our families.” The legislation “introduces direct mechanisms for taking children away from families,” he added.

Supporters of the law, meanwhile, argue that many outspoken opponents of the bill have links to the Russian government, and are, in effect, complicit in a campaign to extend Russian influence across Eurasia. Supporters of the law, meanwhile, argue that many outspoken opponents of the bill have links to the Russian government, and are, in effect, complicit in a campaign to extend Russian influence across Eurasia.

“The majority of those speaking out against the law, as well as the majority of the media outlets who oppose the law, are clearly pro-Russia, many of them receive grants from Russia,” said Daniel Ioanisian, the head of the Union of Informed Citizens, a pro-Western think tank in Yerevan.

The Union produced a report in December linking Armenian organizations opposing the domestic violence bill, including the Pan-Armenian Parents’ Committee, to the Russian government. “This merely serves as a convenient pretext to boost anti-European sentiments within the wider public, as it is known that family and children remain the sensitive points of our society,” Ioanisian said.

Russia’s parliament recently voted to soften laws against domestic violence. And over the past several years, Russia has pushed a socially conservative agenda in its soft power efforts, arguing that liberal social movements like gay rights are Western ideas foreign to the Eurasian mentality. That idea has been taken up, whether with or without Russian support, across the former Soviet space, not least in Armenia.

“The themes of domestic violence and gender equality are instruments that certain groups in the society, as well as some authorities, use to divert public attention from real social issues and depict the Western democratic values as degenerate,” said Lara Aharonian, the director of the Women’s Resource Center and a women’s rights activist in Yerevan.

About 60 percent of Armenian women reported that they had suffered from domestic violence at least once in their lives, according to a 2011 survey conducted by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. In the last seven years, 30 women were murdered in cases of domestic violence; in seven of those cases, the murder took place with children present, according to the advocacy group Coalition Against Domestic Violence. About 60 percent of Armenian women reported that they had suffered from domestic violence at least once in their lives.

The Armenian government has disputed claims that the law would take children away from families; the legislation does not in fact address child custody, which is already dealt with in other parts of Armenian law.

“This is clear disinformation; the law has nothing to do with taking children away from their families: to the contrary, it stipulates a clear mechanism for protecting children’s rights and preventing domestic violence. This is what is missing today; often the police lack the ability to exercise any preventive measures,” said Bagrat Ghazinian, an adviser to the Minster of Justice, in an interview with EurasiaNet.

This is not the first time Armenian social issues have gotten caught up in geopolitics. In 2013, a contentious public debate erupted about a so-called “Gender Equality Law,” with opponents painting the law as a European promotion of non-traditional gender roles. That debate got enmeshed in a separate debate about whether to sign an association agreement with the European Union, or to instead join the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union. Ultimately, the gender bill was passed — albeit with a different name, which excluded the word “gender” – and Armenia opted for the Eurasian Union.

The same year, after a strong public backlash against raising prices on transportation, the speaker of Armenia’s parliament, Galust Sahakian, called on protesters “to struggle against the gay rights agenda, instead of the price hike.”

In 2013, “the wave of misrepresentation of European values began,” said Styopa Safarian, a political analyst and the head of the Armenian Institute of International and Security Affairs. “Those events were carefully exploited by certain groups in order to equate European values with gender and LGBT issues, and to sabotage the signing of the association agreement,” Safarian said.

“During those days, pro-Russian circles were actively involved in that propaganda; they were arguing that by signing the Association Agreement we would be accepting gay rights, and organizations that were dealing with women issues were deliberately targeted,” Safarian added.

That pattern has repeated itself with the current debate, said Karine Achemian, an MP from the ruling Republican Party, in an interview with EurasiaNet.org. “The impression I drew from discussions in parliament was that many members weren’t concerned about supporting the victims of domestic violence, but in accusing one another,” Achemian said. “This has turned into a struggle between pro-Russian and pro-European forces. The same happened in 2013 during the discussions of the law on Gender Equality, when, instead, we should have focused on the law and creating real mechanisms for supporting the families.”

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