Fake Pashinyan Letter Addressed to NATO Alleges Armenia’s Readiness to Withdraw Troops from Karabakh

YEREVAN — The Prime Minister’s Public Information Testing Center touched upon a fake letter addressed to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, alleging that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan  has expressed Armenia’s readiness for a closer cooperation with NATO and discusses an implementation of a plan ‘to withdraw troops from the Nagorno Karabakh conflict zone.

Noting that the digital copy of the letter is fraudulent, “Information Check Center” has elaborated. – “The fake photo was first published on June 24 in a French blogging site by a fake user. Then, on June 26, it was published in the Azerbaijani Bakililar forum again by a fake user and became a subject of active discussion. Some users even began to celebrate the “Return of Artsakh”.

By June 28 the fraudulent letter began to spread in a number of Russian forums and little-known websites. The author has a fake user named Arthur Grigoryan.

Information security expert Samvel Martirosyan has posted on Facebook the screenshot of the letter, adding the document is widely circulated on social media. “Apart from reasoned suspicions there are no specifics evidence about the author of the letter,” Martirosyan said in a post, adding one possible version about the author of the document could be it had been done out of Armenia’s territory.

The  photograph of the fraudulent letter reveals absence of a seal or letter number, irregular coat-of-arms of the Republic, as well as a number of content mistakes.