Agents Sent by Russia to Armenia Against Pashinyan: The Insider

The Insider has published an extensive investigation outlining Russia's plans to interfere in Armenia's parliamentary elections and revealing various Russian actors involved in the process. Below is the translation of the article:

“After failures in Moldova and Hungary, the Kremlin has focused all its resources on Armenia, where parliamentary elections will be held on June 7. The Kremlin hopes to prevent Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan's ‘Civil Contract’ party from winning, which has chosen to approach the EU and the USA. The Insider has revealed who oversees Armenia's affairs from the Russian Presidential Administration, which staff members from the Foreign Intelligence Service, the Main Intelligence Directorate, and the Federal Security Service have been dispatched to Armenia to fulfill the predetermined tasks, and how opposition candidates are connected to Russian intelligence services.

**Moscow's Curators for Armenia**

The informational campaign against Pashinyan is coordinated by the recently established Department for Strategic Partnership and Cooperation at the Presidential Administration. This replaces the Department of Cultural Relations, previously headed by Kozak, who was dismissed due to unsuccessful attempts to influence the elections in Moldova. The new department is headed by Vadim Titov, who is under the patronage of the First Deputy Chief of Staff, Sergey Kiriyenko. His appointment started unsuccessfully; before the Hungarian elections, he traveled to Budapest with his assistant, Yegor Kvyatkovsky, but the campaign ended with a crushing defeat for Orban. Now he has a new opportunity to win favor.

Direct curators for Armenia at the Presidential Administration include Valery Chernishov, head of the interregional and socio-cultural relations development department at the Main Intelligence Directorate, and his deputy Dmitry Avanesov, both representatives of the security services. After serving at a Russian military base in Abkhazia in 2013, Chernishov was invited to military intelligence, where he taught the fundamentals of sabotage at courses in the Zagoryansk village of the Shchyolkovo district. Initially, he coordinated issues related to Georgia, later being assigned Armenia.

His deputy, Avanesov, graduated from the Peter the Great Military Academy of Rocket Forces and holds the rank of colonel. In 2012, he completed advanced training courses at the Moscow Institute of New Information Technologies of the FSB, focusing on “Systems for Assessing, Analyzing, and Forecasting the State of National Security.” Both have visited Yerevan multiple times and met with local Kremlin allies.

The figure responsible for Armenian affairs in the Russian government is Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Overchuk. Literally every week, he threatens Armenia with major economic problems if it continues its rapprochement with the European Union and the United States.

At the Russian Foreign Ministry, Mikhail Kalugin, head of the Fourth Department for CIS Countries, deals with Armenia’s elections. He began his diplomatic career as a press attaché in Lithuania when the diplomatic mission was headed by former Deputy Chief of the Foreign Intelligence Service, Yuri Zubakov. In 2006, Kalugin was suspected by Lithuanian intelligence of working for Russian intelligence and was recalled to Moscow. In 2016, he worked as an economic advisor at the Russian embassy in Washington, and his name was mentioned in media connected to Moscow's interference in the US elections. After the publication, he left the US and was appointed as head of a division in the Foreign Ministry's Department for Foreign Policy Planning. In July of last year, he took over the post of head of the Fourth Department for CIS Countries.

The most active organizations in Armenia include the Gorchakov Fund, which promotes Kremlin-friendly narratives, the National Research Institute for Development of Communications, headed by Vladislav Gasumyanov from the Foreign Intelligence Service, and the Institute for Strategic Studies, which serves as an analytical center for outer intelligence, as well as a group of fake political analysts, experts, advisors, and organizations funded by the ‘Old Square.’

Leading figures in the propaganda campaign against Pashinyan are well-known faces: senators Konstantin Kosachev and Konstantin Zatulin. Senator Zatulin heads the ‘International Russian-Armenian Lazarev Club,’ which, by the way, also includes billionaire Karapetian, owner of ‘Tashir.’

The promotion of ‘soft power’ from the Russian embassy is handled by ‘Rossotrudnichestvo.’ Under the auspices of the ‘Russian House’ in Yerevan, seminars, lectures, round tables, and summer camps are held, showcasing films about the ‘revival of Nazism in Ukraine.’ The main focus is on youth, who are constantly injected with the idea that Armenia has a future only with Russia.

The head of the Russian House is Vadim Fefilov, a former military correspondent for NTV. After the pressure put on NTV by Putin in 2000, Fefilov and the main group of journalists moved to ‘TV Center’ funded by Boris Berezovsky. He then returned to NTV and in 2018 became an advisor to the general director of the television channel.

Igor Chayka, the son of former Prosecutor General Yuri Chayka, has recently been appointed head of ‘Rossotrudnichestvo,’ which, among other things, may be connected to preparatory work for interference in Armenia. Chayka Jr. is widely known for corruption scandals in the garbage industry, but recently he has emerged in a completely different light. The Russian opposition funded through Chayka during the Kremlin's interference in Moldova’s elections. In 2022, the US Treasury Department, followed by the EU, included him in the sanctions list.

The former head of ‘Rossotrudnichestvo,’ Evgeny Primakov, repeatedly stated that it was time to end ‘balalaika diplomacy’ and stop wasting money on pointless events abroad, but apparently, the Kremlin disagrees: Primakov was dismissed and Chayka was appointed in his place.

**Agents Living in Armenia and Their Associates**

On June 3, the Russian embassy in Yerevan will be bustling. Associates will be congratulating the Russian trade representative Alexey Mishlyavkin on the occasion of his 65th birthday in the morning. In the evening, a party will be held where toasts will be raised dedicated to Great Russia, Putin, the victory of Russian arms, and more. However, few diplomats suspect that Mishlyavkin is not actually a trade representative but a resident agent of the Foreign Intelligence Service in Armenia. His name does not appear on the Russian embassy's site in Yerevan, but it is included in the diplomatic roster.

Through his numerous agents, Mishlyavkin is aware of every move made by PM Nikol Pashinyan. Since the ‘Velvet Revolution’ of 2018, former opposition journalist Pashinyan has taken up the position of Prime Minister and has become the main target of nearly all Russian intelligence operations in Armenia. In Moscow, he was given the nickname ‘Moustached One’ and a vigorous effort began to collect compromise information on him.

Having finished the academy of the Foreign Intelligence Service, future resident Mishlyavkin was assigned to the external intelligence headquarters in Yasenevo, where he served in the division that prepared illegal immigrants for espionage in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. The Mishlyavkin family lived on Vilnius Street in a house built in 2002 by an order of the Foreign Intelligence Service. In 2017, the Mishlyavkins moved to Komunar village near the Foreign Intelligence Service headquarters, and three years later they were allowed to privatize their service apartment. In November 2020, Mishlyavkin arrived in Yerevan and took over the coordination of resident agents.

During the party, Mishlyavkin's deputy Sergey Katin will be walking beside him. He began his military service as an engineer in the Federal Protective Service’s government communications division and later entered the academy of the Foreign Intelligence Service. After graduation, he registered at ‘Znanije’ company, where he received a fictitious salary of 400 rubles a month. In 2007, Katin officially became a member of the Foreign Intelligence Service's specialized unit 33949 (as evidenced by his credit application), and since 2022, he has been spying in Armenia.

Katin's new wife, Yevgenia, is the financial director of American ChampionX company, which operates in the field of chemical and drilling solutions. In 2024, ChampionX will be acquired by SLB (formerly Schlumberger, located in Houston) for $7.76 billion. In Russia, SLB collaborates with Gazprom, Rosneft, and Lukoil. After the aggression against Ukraine, it did not cut back operations like many Western companies, but rather expanded and hired about a thousand new employees. However, to circumvent sanctions, the company purchases equipment not from Western countries but from China and India.

A representative of Rosatom in Armenia, Vyacheslav Proshkin, will definitely be present at Mishlyavkin's party. His responsibilities include overseeing the Metzamor nuclear power plant, which was built during the Soviet era and is located 26 km away from Yerevan. In reality, this is merely a cover, as he is a personnel officer of the Main Intelligence Directorate and closely monitors the Armenian leadership.

Proshkin began his military service in the Ministry of Defense’s Main Department for International Cooperation, then moved to the renowned Center for Financial Support of Special Programs of the Ministry of Defense (Military Unit 22280). This center manages vast sums of money and finances the Ministry of Defense's secret projects in the nuclear sector, medical vaccine production, and part of the budget goes to military intelligence. In 2020, a major scandal erupted when a former accountant of Military Unit 14118 told journalists about a secret scheme for embezzling budgetary funds. According to him, the commander of the center, Colonel Georgi Vasilyev, with the participation of employees from the Ministry of Defense’s 48th Central Research Institute and Military Unit 14118, “stole over 355 million rubles through various payments, bonuses, and benefits received from fictitious persons.”

**FSB Squad: Kivachuk, Kucheryuk, Gladishchuk**

The embassy will be represented by advisor Sergey Kivachuk and first secretary Vitaly Kucheryuk. Before coming to Armenia, FSB General Kivachuk had never been abroad (at least not under his real name). He served in Altai, in the Krasnoyarsk Territory, and in Udmurtia, and in 2017 he was appointed head of the FSB office in Mari El. In the Altai Territory, law enforcement agencies pursued him for demanding transport taxes, and in Udmurtia he placed his wife in a job as a specialist in secret recordings at the Kalashnikov concern. The chief editor of the ‘Den’ newspaper, Sergey Shchukin, who published this news was soon searched, and in 2017 he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for extorting from the concern's executive director Konstantin Busigin.

General Kivachuk is not only spying on Pashinyan but is also closely monitoring Russians who have gone to Armenia since the start of mobilization. Many of these relocants have become outspoken critics of Putin and oppose the war in Ukraine. All of them need to be kept under operational control, and agents need to be embedded in their environment. Thus, General Kivachuk has much to do in Yerevan.

Another guest at the party will be the embassy's first secretary Sergey Kucheryuk. He has no relation to diplomatic work and served before arriving in Armenia in the Baltic Fleet and the FSB's troops in the Kaliningrad region, which is part of the FSB's Eastern Military District. He is often seen at the Russian military base in Gyumri, where he meets with his agents.

According to The Insider's sources in the intelligence services, the “chekist-osobist” (military counterintelligence staff) is a member of a group that carried out a covert operation against Kristine Grigoryan, the head of Armenia's Foreign Intelligence Service. In 2023, Pashinyan signed a decree to establish the Foreign Intelligence Service and appointed not a career intelligence officer but the republic’s ombudsman Kristine Grigoryan as its head.

“Kristine was invited to Moscow for a brief internship at the Foreign Intelligence Academy, to talk. But she went to the CIA in the USA for a certain understanding, and then the Americans helped her create the necessary structure in Yerevan. Of course, the Russians delved into her personal life, but in operational terms, they did not obtain any significant information,” said a source from the editorial board of the intelligence services. Meanwhile, under Grigoryan's leadership, the intelligence service has begun to work actively, and in March this year, she announced that, on the eve of the elections, the intelligence services were exerting pressure on Armenian citizens living abroad. Of course, this mainly concerned Russia, where more than a million Armenians live.

Attaché Alexander Gladishchuk will probably bring gifts for resident Mishlyavkin. Before Yerevan, he served at the Ministry of Defense's 946th Main Geographic Information Center in Noginsk, near Moscow. The task of this secret unit is to “provide specialized geographic information necessary for use in various types of high-precision weapons and systems.” Gladishchuk had previously been sent to Belgium, where he created detailed maps showing NATO military facilities and economically significant enterprises. In 2020, after the military actions in Nagorno-Karabakh began, he was transferred to Yerevan. Apparently, he has already noted strategically important sites for Armenia on operational maps.