Europe Wins Again. Obviously. Armenia went to the polls yesterday. And the results are exactly what you’d expect if you’d been paying attention for the past five years, rather than wallowing in Kremlin nostalgia like a damp sock. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan declared victory on Monday, with his Civil Contract Party leading with 52.5% of the vote.  Armenia, a landlocked country the size of Belgium that Russia has spent decades treating as a vassal state, has looked at its options and made a decision that required roughly the same level of intellectual effort as choosing between a Michelin-starred restaurant and a skip fire. They chose Europe. This election was less a routine vote than a referendum on Pashinyan’s post-2020 course reducing dependence on Russia and moving toward an explicit European orientation. And Russia, naturally, did everything in its power to stop it. According to Reuters, citing Western intelligence officials, the election faced heavy Russian covert interference, including disinformation campaigns and a plan to transport Russian Armenians into Armenia to sway the vote. One analyst collective described it as one of the largest state-backed disinformation campaigns in modern European history. And Armenia still told them to get lost. Putin had already warned Armenia it would face economic consequences for drifting westward, and introduced restrictions on Armenian agricultural exports in the weeks before the vote.  Threats, propaganda, economic blackmail. The full Russian toolkit. Result: irrelevant. Now, Trump, Tucker Carlson and JD Vance would like you to believe that Russia represents some superior civilisational model. A proud, white, Christian fortress holding the line against the Muslim hordes supposedly swamping Europe. It is a compelling narrative, in the same way that flat earth theory is compelling if you ignore every single fact available to you. Here is one such fact: between 10 and 15 percent of Russia’s own population is Muslim. Tatars, Bashkirs, Chechens, Ingush, Dagestanis. Millions of them. Russia is, by its own demographic reality, a multi-ethnic, multi-faith state with a larger Muslim population than most of Western Europe. But you’re not supposed to know that. It complicates the story. Meanwhile, the Muslim share of the EU population sits at around 5 percent. But the Tucker Carlsons of the world need you frightened, so the numbers get quietly shuffled off stage. So Armenia joins the queue. Behind Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, and every Eastern European country that isn’t currently run by a Slovak who seems to have wandered in from a Moscow focus group. The pattern is not subtle. Every country that has actually experienced Russian influence in practice is sprinting in the opposite direction. The only nation currently moving toward Russia’s orbit is the United States, which managed to elect a man whose foreign policy instincts were apparently shaped by a property developer’s admiration for strongmen with good buildings. The world watches America and hopes it finds its way back. Most people think it will. Eventually. The damage, however, is already considerable, and democracy, like a soufflé, does not always survive rough handling. Armenia made its choice. The right one. Obviously. Gandalv / @Microinteracti1 x.com/LesiaLVD/status/206374…

😠 1.6 million Ukrainian children have lived under Russian occupation since 2014, with 742,000 forcibly relocated or deported to Russia between Feb and Dec 2022 alone, Ukraine's ombudsman says.