Ambassadors of EU member states in Brussels endorsed the deployment on Wednesday, paving the way for final approval, which is expected at a meeting of EU foreign ministers next week.
RFE/RL obtained the text of a proposal by the EU’s foreign and security policy chief, Kaja Kallas, outlining the mission’s mandate, structure, and timeframe. Under the document, the mission is intended to “enhance the resilience of Armenia in the field of hybrid threats through the provision of strategic advice as well as operational level advice and support to relevant security sector agencies.”
This assistance will focus on “the development of strategies, policies and protocols for countering hybrid threats, notably Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) and cyber, as well as illicit financial flows in the electoral and political context, and enhancing cybersecurity and FIMI resilience.” It will also help identify Armenia’s “needs for capacity building in the security sector for monitoring, early warning, detection, identification, attribution of and response to hybrid threats, including in the area of FIMI and cyber in line with EU methodologies and standards.”
This assistance “should be aimed clearly at reducing and mitigating Russia’s destabilizing activities,” according to the document.
The planned European Union Partnership Mission (EUPM Armenia) is expected to be deployed in Armenia for a period of two years. It will comprise 20-30 personnel on the ground.
The EU already decided last month to send a “hybrid rapid response team” to Yerevan for the Armenian parliamentary elections slated for June 7. The Armenian government requested the deployment late last year after implicitly alleging Russian “hybrid” threats to the integrity of the electoral process.
The EU sent such a mission to Moldova for the parliamentary elections held there last September. Two Moldovan opposition parties deemed pro-Russian were disqualified from the vote won by the former Soviet republic’s pro-Western leadership.
Armenia’s leading opposition groups are concerned that some of them too could be barred from running in the upcoming elections in which Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian could face an uphill battle for political survival. Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly warned Pashinian against doing that when they met in Moscow on April 1.
Putin also implicitly warned that Armenia would pay a heavy economic price for its government’s continued efforts to join the EU. He noted that Russia remains Armenia’s most important trading partner and supplies it with natural gas at a significant discount. Pashinian and his political allies have since sought to downplay Yerevan’s tensions with Moscow.
The EU’s European External Action Service pointed to the Armenian elections in a separate document justifying the need for the new mission.