The Russian bot network Matryoshka has launched a disinformation campaign in the wake of Armenia’s parliamentary elections, held on June 7. Researchers with the Antibot4Navalny project, which tracks pro-Russian bot activity on social media, provided The Insider with its latest findings about the new campaign.
The central storyline of the fake narrative is the real hacking of Tchap, a French government messaging app that the bots use as a “source” for fabricated leaks. Videos branded with the logos of Western media outlets spread several narratives:
- One fabricated video claims that “leaked” correspondence by France’s defense minister confirmed that Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan had agreed to turn his country into a “military foothold” against Russia. In one video, Alexis Brézet, the real editor-in-chief of French outlet Le Figaro, is falsely quoted as saying that “whereas previously all this was merely rumours and unconfirmed insider information, we now have direct confirmation.”
- Another fake video attributed to Libération claims that French Armed Forces Minister Catherine Vautrin, who has held the post since October 2025, discussed in Tchap that after Armenia had been “used,” Turkey and Azerbaijan would be able to “devour” it. The fake claims that Vautrin “mocked” the fact that Armenians had been “sold the idea of EU membership” and that French authorities are supposedly “in possession of plans drawn up by Turkey and Azerbaijan to annex parts of Armenia.”
- A third narrative claims France spent 120 million euros to rig the election in favor of Pashinyan and his Civil Contract party, and another 120 million to 150 million euros to interfere in Moldova’s elections. In a video using France 24 branding, Thibaut Bruttin, the real director general of Reporters Without Borders, is falsely quoted as saying French officials “factored in Nikol Pashinyan’s corruption [when discussing the allocation of funds” and expected him and his party to “embezzle the money allocated to them for vote rigging.”
- The bots also claim that French officials used “the same manipulation technologies in Armenia as they did in Moldova,” alleging that 40,000 Greeks “were granted citizenship in exchange for money and were brought to Armenia via Turkey.”
- Another fake, attributed to the investigative group Bellingcat — and using The Insider’s logo — claims that the son of Olivier Decottignies, France’s ambassador to Armenia since 2023, raped two underage Armenian girls in 2025 and that the case was covered up “at the highest level.” The video claims French officials referred to the victims in correspondence as “a pair of animals [that] simply ended up in the slaughterhouse,” presenting this as the “standard tone used by French officials when discussing Armenia and its citizens.”
- A separate video with the Spiegel TV logo claims Emmanuel Macron was furious over the election results because Pashinyan had been “misleading the French elite for a year” by “claiming his approval rating was no less than 61%” (he won with 49.85% of the overall vote). In the video, Fritz Scharpf, a real German political scientist and honorary director of the Max Planck Institute, is falsely quoted as saying that media outlets such as Euronews “have hailed this as a historic victory,” even though the result is “dismal” given the "appalling scale of electoral fraud perpetrated by the Civil Contract party.”
- Another video attributed to the German news portal t-online claims Vautrin called Armenians “savages” in the leaked correspondence. It also falsely attributes to German journalist Lars Wienand an argument that France “has never abandoned its colonial policies.”
Another element of the campaign involves fake covers and screenshots of Western media outlets. The bots are spreading fabricated Euronews screenshots with the headline “The battle of wills has been lost,” France 24 pages saying “Prime Minister Pashinyan has ceded the initiative to Armenia’s opposition forces,” DW pages saying “Pashinyan is passing off failure as victory,” and fake June 9 front pages of French newspapers, with Libération purportedly claiming “Pashinyan loses his advantage,” La Croix that “Election results destroy Pashinyan’s hopes,” and Le Parisien that the election was marked by “Corruption, blackmail, fraud.” All follow the theme that the elections were supposedly a failure for Pashinyan and a disappointment for his European partners.
Armenia’s elections and the Tchap hack
In reality, Civil Contract won the June 7 elections with 49.85% of the vote, taking 64 out of the 105 seats in parliament, enough to form a government on its own. However, the party does not have a two-thirds constitutional majority, and the bots exploit that real fact by portraying the result as a “failure.”
The Tchap hack that the bots use as the basis for the fakes was also real. On June 7, the day of Armenia’s elections, France’s cybersecurity agency ANSSI recorded a hack of the government messenger through a compromised account. The hackers claimed they had stolen 13.5 gigabytes of data, including more than 643,000 messages and information on 73,000 accounts. French authorities stressed that the attacker gained access only to public rooms, while private conversations protected by end-to-end encryption were not affected. There have been no confirmed leaks in the published data involving Armenia, nor have there been any credible reports of election fraud.
The Insider has links to the original posts and materials from Bot Blocker confirming that the accounts that published them belong to the Matryoshka network. The newsroom is not publishing direct links to avoid helping spread the disinformation.
What is Matryoshka?
Researchers use the name Matryoshka for a Russian operation that spreads fake stories on a massive scale using a coordinated infrastructure of bots, trolls and anonymous platforms. Its aim is to create artificial information noise and manipulate perceptions of events both in Russia and abroad. Antibot4Navalny named the operation “Matryoshka” after the Russian nesting doll, with the bots hiding behind one another, and disinformation being spread in layers across different platforms, making the original source harder to identify.
The mechanism works in two directions. The first is the creation of large numbers of fake profiles that pose as ordinary people, independent media outlets, or think tanks. These accounts generate dozens of posts a day, copying local speech patterns. The second is the simultaneous launch of identical content on X (formerly Twitter), Telegram, Bluesky, and closed chats. To appear convincing, the bots use the logos of well-known Western media outlets and human rights organizations.
