Newspaper: Russia could restore its influence in Caucasus by hard means

Hraparak daily of Armenia writes as follows, in particular: The RF [(Russian Federation)] Foreign Intelligence Service [(FIS)] recently issued a controversial statement: “Washington is pushing Armenia to national suicide.” That is, the US is attempting to accelerate Armenia’s adoption of a pro-Western course by using the methods tested in Ukraine and Moldova.

“There is a task to give a stable anti-Russian direction to the social and political processes in Armenia. For this purpose, Washington intends to launch a long-term information and propaganda campaign, one of the objectives of which will be to discredit Yerevan’s cooperation prospects with Russia, EAEU, and CSTO and to spread information about the pressures being applied to people from Armenian who went to work abroad in Russia.”

According to the [Armenian] authorities’ sources, before this statement, a delegation of the RF FIS officials visited Armenia and presented the information in their possession about the amount of money some organizations and representatives of the authorities [of Armenia] receive from the West for anti-Russian propaganda.

They have insinuated that in Armenia as well, following the example of Georgia, adopt the law “On Foreign Agents” in order to prevent the flow of money being received from abroad. If not, it is not ruled that the RF will restore its influence in the Caucasus by hard means. They did not elaborate on how.