Over the past decade, individuals linked to Kremlin outlet Sputnik’s Armenia branch have cultivated an extensive network of Facebook pages and groups targeting the Armenian diaspora, a DFRLab investigation has found.

Special interest fan pages devoted to food recipes, sports, and beautiful women, among other topics, administered groups dedicated to Armenian culture, politics, and identity. (On Facebook, both pages and accounts can be administrators of groups.) Almost all of the pages were linked to the profiles of Sputnik Armenia employees and their family members. The groups, meanwhile, served as content amplification platforms for the Sputnik Armenia website, as well as for a second media outlet, ArmeniaON. Prior to publication, the DFRLab shared this story with Facebook, which has since made the independent decision to remove most of the assets in this analysis.

In both strategy and content, this network bore a strong resemblance to another Sputnik operation the DFRLab covered in January 2019. The earlier network, which spanned nearly 300 Facebook pages, also used inauthentic Facebook fan pages devoted to special-interest content to funnel audiences from the Baltics, Central Asia, and the Caucasus to the Sputnik website.

As in the earlier operation, this network’s primary aim was not to promote a cohesive political or ideological agenda. Rather, it seemed focused on building trust and exposure to the Sputnik media brand among an Armenian diaspora audience — albeit doing so via covert means.

Armenia has the largest diaspora community of any post-Soviet state in proportion to its population: an estimated 8–11 million Armenians live outside of the country, in comparison to the roughly 3 million who live within the country. The diaspora is generally politically active with regard to Armenian affairs and plays a critical role in supporting the country’s economic development as well as developing its human capital. For the Kremlin, building a loyal Armenian diaspora audience for a Russian state propaganda outlet establishes a conduit through which it can exercise influence over Armenian society, domestic politics, and foreign affairs.

That much of the network’s content was not political suggested that the operation was in an early audience-building stage. Kremlin disinformation campaigns often start with banal, non-ideological topics to attract a wide audience; at a later stage, they begin to inject that audience’s media diet with Kremlin propaganda. That said, the network also promoted content that inflamed tensions with Armenia’s neighbors, characterized Armenia as a failing state, and positioned Russia as Armenia’s protector.

All in the Family

In all, the DFRLab was able to identify four individual users, 14 pages, and 18 groups as part of this network.