Gevorg Grigoryan, a 23-year-old who holds both Armenian and Russian citizenship, has been sentenced to 9.5 years in prison by a court in the Siberian city of Chita over comments he had made on social media years before. Sources told the independent Russian media outlet Mediazona that Grigoryan had been angered by Russian inaction during Azerbaijan’s 2023 offensive into Nagorno-Karabakh, and wrote ‘Hitler should have destroyed them all’, referring to Russians, and that ‘after Ukraine, [Russian troops] will enter Armenia’. Grigoryan was charged with spreading ‘fake’ information about the military, disseminating military ‘fakes’, ‘rehabilitating Nazism’, and calling for ‘terrorism’ and ‘extremism’. In a statement following his arrest in 2025, Russia’s Investigative Committee said he wrote ‘comments containing offensive language’ and also ‘openly supported the ideology of Nazism’. The charges have become increasingly commonplace since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and accompanying crackdown on freedom of expression in Russia. There have been hundreds of documented cases over the following years of prison sentences being handed down for similar charges pertaining to social media comments or other statements criticising Russia or its military aggression against Ukraine. While Russia was not treaty-bound to support Nagorno-Karabakh during the final offensive in 2023, it did have peacekeeping operations on the ground, which did not act to prevent the outbreak of violence. Under obligations of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), which both Russia and Armenia are members of, Russia was required to come to Armenia’s aid during Azerbaijani incursions into its internationally recognised territory in 2021 and 2022, but did not. The failure of either Russia or the CSTO to act at that time has been a key factor in the turning of Armenian public opinion away from Russia, and has also led to Armenia freezing its participation in the CSTO.