Unmasked fake “Armenian” website Vestiarmenii.info created by Azerbaijan propaganda
A new website, Vestiarmenii.info, introducing itself as Armenian has appeared on the net, Samvel Martirosyan, an Armenian expert on information security, writes on his blog Banman.am.
According to the report, the website Vestiarmenii.info, created on 29 September 2015, was used by the Azerbaijani military propaganda on 3 October to legitimize a video posted online from Baku. The expert believes the website was used as an answer to the reports of the Armenian side about a closed screening of a video showing the destruction of Azerbaijani military bases.
The chronology of the reporting is as follows: on 3 October in the morning, the Azerbaijani media ran a video allegedly showing the annihilation of Armenian troops. Later, the Azerbaijani website Report.az cited “some Armenian sources in the social media” as reporting about the above mentioned operation. The rest of the Azerbaijani media circulated the report citing Report.az.
The source of the video is a YouTube account registered under the name Karen Petrosyan on 2 October. Remarkably, the only note in the video description is a link to an article published on an allegedly Armenian website “Vestiarmenii.info,” unknown before. The article was titled “Где ваша логика, господин Сейра́н Оганя́н?” (Russian: “Where is your logic, Mr Seyrán Ohanyán?” (the Defense Minister of Armenia)
This title itself indicates that the website cannot be Armenian, as “an Armenian would hardly write vowels with graphic accents.” “Notably, the Defense minister’s name and surname are written with graphic accents. There can only be one reason – the author did not know the minister’s name and copied it from Wikipedia,” Martirosyan points noting that the names in the Russian Wikipedia are written exactly that way. He highlights that a competent Armenian journalist would hardly search the Defense Minister’s name in the online encyclopedia.
The expert further brings up another proof that the website belongs to the Azerbaijani propaganda. The email [email protected], on which the domain name of the website is registered, as well as the nick kalibra0815 can be found only in one place on the Internet – the website Anti-Armenia.org, the Azerbaijani hackers’ main platform. The user kalibra0815 was registered there at the beginning of September. “The email [email protected] also appeared on Anti-Armenia.org and is still preserved in Google cache,” Martirosyan notes.
The Azerbaijani propagandists creating fake “Armenian” platforms for using it as a “legalizator” of their propaganda, attracting Armenian users and circulating false information among them is nothing new. The notorious website ArmenianReport.com is a vivid example unmasked long ago.