Armenia voted through the storm. The deepfakes moved on to Question Time

Armenia votes through the heaviest interference campaign since Moldova

Nikol Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party won Armenia’s June 7 parliamentary elections with 49.81 percent of the vote, the Central Election Commission announced Monday after counting all 2,005 polling stations. The Strong Armenia alliance of Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan finished second on 23.29 percent. The result gives Civil Contract roughly 64 of 105 seats and Pashinyan a third term – and it arrived at the end of what researchers described as the most extensive pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign in Europe since Moldova’s 2025 vote: 343 fabricated videos from the Matryoshka operation by early May alone, plus parallel output from Storm-1516 and the Foundation to Battle Injustice attributed by NewsGuard.

The OSCE observers called the process well-run while documenting escalating trade restrictions and security threats from abroad aimed at swinging voters toward the opposition. Their statement also cut the other way: numerous criminal proceedings against opposition candidates over alleged vote-buying left many opposition supporters afraid to campaign. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said the vote showed Armenia’s “democratic resilience” despite “unprecedented interference” – hybrid attacks and economic coercion included.

The campaign was also unusually well documented. Le Figaro’s Marielle Vitureau, reporting from Vilnius, profiled the Lithuanian narrative-intelligence firm Repsense, whose tracing software supports a group of experts and international funders in Yerevan tracking the disinformation. Between November 2025 and April 2026 the firm analysed more than 21,000 TikTok videos from nearly 1,500 sources and concluded that “58 percent of antigovernment messages on TikTok are the result of coordinated action,” in the words of co-founder Mykolas Katkus – coordination he described as much more aggressive than around Moldova’s September 2025 elections. The report Le Figaro consulted describes automated coordination at the level of Russian-language Telegram sources and thirteen coordinated Armenian-language accounts producing most of the platform’s antigovernment messaging, with “Pashinyan is a traitor” among the recurring narratives. Armenia, for its part, launched a public fact-checking site where citizens can test suspect claims.

Moscow’s preferred forces now hold opposition benches, not government. All three parliamentary opposition parties had campaigned on repairing ties with Russia; OC Media reports Karapetyan intends to challenge the results. After three months of fabricated broadcasts, spoofed Euronews reports and AI-generated war panic, the pro-Russian runner-up finished 26 points behind.

Farage never punched the Bank of England governor. The crypto scam needed him to.

Adverts circulating on X this week showed Reform UK leader Nigel Farage brawling with Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey on the set of BBC Question Time – black eye, gun, police separating the pair. None of it happened. Cybernews traced the synthetic clips to fabricated news articles promoting an unregistered crypto platform called Fundektris, pushed through recently verified X accounts with handfuls of followers. The Bank of England reported the videos to X and warned the clips keep reappearing in users’ feeds.

Bitdefender researchers told The Telegraph the campaign belongs to a global, coordinated investment-scam ecosystem run by Russian-language criminal operators – highly likely the same network previously uncovered on Facebook. Farage took it lightly on X: he’d seen the “bizarre AI videos” and, disagreements aside, “would never take it that far.”

Five Eyes goes public, together, on China’s fake-recruiter machine

On June 3, ASIO, CSIS, the FBI, MI5 and NZSIS published Safeguarding Our Secrets, a joint bulletin warning that China’s military intelligence services run networks of fake online recruiters and consultants – fronting “cover companies” registered outside China – to approach people with access to classified or privileged information on professional networking and job platforms. The Washington Post noted that joint public warnings of this kind are rare; this is the first time all five domestic services have combined on threats spreading through job platforms.

The bulletin describes a patient funnel: flattering outreach, paid “consulting” on innocuous topics, then escalating pressure to hand over non-public material for unnamed clients tied to the Chinese government. The stated objective, per the bulletin, is intelligence that gives China “a strategic and tactical advantage over the Five Eyes.” CNN reports the targeting concentrates on defence, foreign affairs and intelligence specialists, including military personnel stationed in the Indo-Pacific.

No platforms are named in the bulletin, and the agencies route worried job-seekers to the UK NPSA’s Applicant Beware guidance. The relevance for this newsletter: the approach relies on fabricated personas, cover identities and engineered trust – the same building blocks used in influence operations, applied here to recruitment rather than messaging.