Category: 2023

LONDON (Reuters) – Researchers have discovered Israeli-made Pegasus phone hacking software deployed against targets across Armenia, including reporters at a U.S. government-funded news organization, a report released on Thursday found.

A team of researchers from digital rights group Access Now, human rights organization Amnesty International, Canadian internet watchdog Citizen Lab, Armenian digital defense group CyberHUB-AM and independent researcher Ruben Muradyan, said they had confirmed at least 12 cases in which espionage software made by Israel's NSO Group had been used against Armenian officials, journalists and organizers.

What researchers were able to confirm "is the tip of the iceberg," said Natalia Krapiva, the tech-legal counsel for Access Now. "The targeting was quite extensive."

Pegasus is one of many advanced espionage tools that affords hackers sweeping access to their targets' smartphones, allowing them to record calls, intercept messages and even transform the phones into portable listening devices.

Researchers, lawmakers, and journalists have repeatedly accused the technology's maker, Israel-based NSO Group, of helping governments spy on political opponents. In 2021, the company was blacklisted by the U.S. government over human rights concerns.

In an email, NSO Group said it was unable to address the specific allegations made by the coalition of researchers but that it would "investigate all credible allegations of misuse".

The company has previously disputed accusations of wrongdoing, saying its software is used to fight terrorism and serious crime.

One of the alleged Armenian victims of NSO's spyware said those explanations do not reflect reality.

"That's a kind of ridiculous umbrella for the companies that create these products and the governments that use them," Armenian opposition broadcaster Samvel Farmanyan told Reuters.

He added that his targeting was "totally unacceptable (and had) nothing to do with the prevention of any type of crime or terrorism."

AZERBAIJAN DENIES RESPONSIBILITY

The researchers said they believed neighboring Azerbaijan, which has fought several wars with Armenia over the disputed chunk of territory known as Nagorno-Karabakh or Artsakh, was likely responsible for the hacking activity.

That's in part because of "extensive evidence" that Azerbaijan's government has previously used Pegasus against its domestic opponents, said Amnesty's Donncha O Cearbhaill, referring to a 2021 investigation by Amnesty and other partners that found hundreds of Azeri phone numbers had been selected for targeting with Pegasus spyware.

The Azeri Embassy in London said in a statement that Azerbaijan "does not engage in such practices" and "does not spy on foreign citizens".

The Armenian government has in the past been implicated in the deployment of phone hacking software, including in a report published last year by Alphabet's Google.

While that report pointed to a different spyware, known as Predator, several Pegasus victims in Armenia said they feared their own government was behind the recent surveillance.

The Armenian Embassy in London said its government rejected the alleged use of spyware at the "highest level".

"Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan made a strong public statement categorically rejecting the circulating information that the authorities used spyware against opponents and/or journalists," it said in a statement.

Pashinyan and family members had also received messages warning that their devices may have been compromised, it added.

Reuters spoke to several alleged victims identified by the researchers. All said Apple Inc had sent them warnings in 2021 that their iPhones were at risk from spyware. They later discovered traces of Pegasus on their devices through forensic analyses.

Two of them were journalists with the U.S. government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), something RFE/RL executive Patrick Boehler said was "truly terrifying and appalling".

"If we cannot protect our sources, it has consequences for the depth and breadth of our journalism," he said.

Other alleged victims included Varuzhan Geghamyan, an academic and expert on Armenian-Azeri relations, and Ruben Melikyan, a lawyer and human rights activist.

They all condemned the spying.

"Psychologically it's devastating," said Farmanyan, the broadcaster.

(Reporting by Raphael Satter and James Pearson in London; editing by Bill Berkrot and Mark Heinrich)

May 25, 2023 8:32 AM EDT

Stockholm, May 25, 2023—In response to a report released Thursday by a group of rights organizations alleging that Pegasus spyware was used to surveil at least five Armenian members of the press who covered the country’s military conflict with Azerbaijan, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued the following statement:

“Today’s report is yet another deeply disturbing reminder of the immense danger posed by Pegasus and other spyware used to target journalists,” said Carlos Martinez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director, in New York. “Armenian and Azerbaijani authorities should allow transparent inquiries into the targeting of Armenian journalists with Pegasus, and NSO Group must offer a convincing response to the report’s findings and stop providing its technologies to states or other actors who target journalists.”

The report, “Hacking in a war zone: Pegasus spyware in the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict,” identified at least 12 people whose devices were infected by Pegasus, spyware produced by the Israeli company NSO Group. Many of the infections clustered around the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war between Armenia and Azerbaijan and its subsequent escalations.

The report was published Thursday, May 25, by the rights groups Access Now, Amnesty International, and Citizen Lab, the Armenian digital emergencies group CyberHUB-AM, as well as independent mobile security researcher Ruben Muradyan.

The targets included Armenian human rights activists, academics, and state officials, two media representatives who requested to be kept anonymous, and three named journalists:

• Karlen Aslanyan, a reporter with the U.S. Congress-funded broadcaster RFE/RL’s Armenian service, Radio Azatutyun
• Astghik Bedevyan, a reporter with Radio Azatutyun
• Samvel Farmanyan, co-founder of the now-defunct independent broadcaster ArmNews TV

The report says its authors found “substantial evidence” suggesting that Azerbaijan authorities purchased access to Pegasus, and that the targets would have been of intense interest to Azerbaijan. The targets were also critical of Armenia’s government, which is believed to have previously used another spyware product.

NSO Group previously told CPJ that it licenses Pegasus to fight crime and terrorism, stating that it investigates “all credible claims of misuse and take[s] appropriate action,” including shutting down a customer’s access to the software.

CPJ has documented the grave threat posed to journalists by spyware, and joined with other rights groups to issue recommendations to policymakers and companies to combat the use of spyware against the media, including by imposing bans on technology and vendors implicated in human rights abuses.

Azerbaijani journalists Sevinj Vagifgizi and Khadija Ismayilova were previously confirmed to have had their devices infected with Pegasus, while dozens of other prominent Azerbaijani journalists featured on a leaked list of potential Pegasus targets analyzed by the collaborative investigation Pegasus Project in 2021.

CPJ emailed NSO Group, the National Security Service and Ministry of Internal Affairs of Armenia, and the State Security Service and Ministry of Internal Affairs of Azerbaijan for comment, but did not immediately receive any replies.

 Faizan Hashmi  Published May 25, 2023 | 11:30 PM

NEVER SAY NEVER

• In Daily Brief
• May 25, 2023
• Can Eker

Russia will host the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan for a meeting in Moscow today.

Two years after the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, which concluded after Russian mediation, the post-Soviet neighbors are gathering to hold high-level talks amidst continued tensions. Earlier this month, border skirmishes broke out after Yerevan reported that Azerbaijani drone strikes had injured two Armenian soldiers. While the leaders recently met in Brussels, they have accepted Russia’s proposal to hold a trilateral meeting today in Moscow to negotiate a potential peace treaty.

For Moscow, this meeting bears a special diplomatic significance amidst its ongoing military incursion in Ukraine, which is currently at a standstill. Hence, Moscow desires to reaffirm its strong foothold in the South Caucasus during the short to medium-term. Russia’s concern accelerated after ongoing attempts from the West to undermine Russian influence in the region and mediate a peace treaty between Yerevan and Baku. In this framework, irked by the large swaths of land it lost after the war, and discontent with Russia’s post-war efforts as a mediator, Yerevan will likely move closer to the West. A peace treaty is therefore highly unlikely to occur given the current circumstances.

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said during a meeting in Moscow on Thursday that there are serious grounds for normalising relations with Armenia based on mutual recognition of territorial integrity.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been at loggerheads for three decades, fighting two wars over the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh. In recent months, both sides have expressed increasing willingness to sign a permanent peace agreement, even as regular skirmishes have continued.

https://kfgo.com/2023/05/25/azerbaijans-aliyev-says-there-is-real-chance-of-peace-deal-with-armenia/

The history of the Jews among the nations of the earth is filled with delicate moments. And so it is today for the Jews of Yerevan.

Armenia, a young democracy that is also the oldest Christian civilization in the world, grapples with the post-Soviet sordidness. Students of the genre will know this includes not only a legacy of corruption and a problematic housing stock but also border disputes: the USSR’s internal borders mangled the ethnic map so thoroughly as to guaranteed conflicts should its republics one day become independent states. It was a feature, not a bug.

So it is, famously, between Russia and Ukraine – and so it is, no less passionately, between Armenia and Azerbaijan. There was a terrible war in 2020, instigated by the latter, there are border skirmishes now and then, and about 120,000 ethnic Armenians in the Nagorno-Karabakh region since December have been under a blockade by what is technically their own government in Baku.

And whereas Israel has labored (not always very elegantly) to stay away from the Ukraine war, it is implicated to the hilt in the latter – on the side of Azerbaijan, a petro-kleptocracy that makes Armenia’s other neighboring nemesis, Turkey, look like a model of democracy and reasonable governance.

Israel is a major weapons supplier to and oil importer from the government of Ilham Aliyev and reputedly uses the country as a sort-of forward base for its own imbroglios with Iran. It is one of the world’s prime exemplars of realpolitik in action, and it is not making Israel very popular at all in Yerevan.

Spare a moment, then, for the handful of Armenian Jews who soldier on, as Jews have done for millennia in all kinds of situations, yielding all kinds of results.

* * *

Rabbi Gershon Burstein seems like a man out of space and time. Bearded and berobed, intelligent eyes sparking beneath his shtreimel, he presides over a makeshift synagogue in a ramshackle neighborhood, where he labors to pull together a minyan as part of his project to keep the flame of Judaism alive in Yerevan. Surrounded by Shavuot pastries, we reflect on how there is also an Armenian diaspora in Israel – indeed an entire quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City.

I asked the 63-year-old chief (and probably only) rabbi what kept him in his place of birth when he so clearly belongs in Jerusalem or Bnei Brak. He answered with a story (which may come as no surprise): in 2011 at a Chabad conference he was asked the same question by a Jerusalem-based rabbi more learned than myself. The man asked Rabbi Burstein how many yeshivas there were in Yerevan (there are none) and how many minyans (they are rare). “What are you doing there then?” the other rabbi asked. Burstein replied by asking how many yeshivas there were in Jerusalem. “Oh, many,” the man proudly replied. “And how many minyans?” “More than I can count.” So Gershom asked: “What are you, then, doing there?”

Burstein denies that there is nationalism in this idea of keeping Jewishness alive in far-flung corners of the Earth. In his version of Judaism, there is ahavat hinam (unconditional love) for all mankind, and all the world is as one. The Holy Land stands apart, but it, too, is meant for all. He concedes that this is not really the animating sentiment among the religious establishment in Israel. That will have to wait, he hypothesized, until yemot meshiach (the arrival of the Messiah). Until then, we must suffice with ahavat Yisrael (love among Jews).

Burstein believes Armenia has a role in this future utopia, because of Mount Ararat, its national symbol. This is the reputed resting place after the great biblical flood of Noah’s Ark, which he notes carried representatives of all creatures and thus stood for global unity as well.

“There is a link between Mount Moriah in the Holy Land and Armenia’s Mount Ararat,” he said. “We are connected in this mission.”

Ararat visibly looms over Yerevan like a snowy, jagged specter, not 20 kilometers away – but across a sealed border. Lenin gifted “Western Armenia” on behalf of the Soviet Union to Turkey in 1923, shortly after the Ottoman massacre of 1.5 million Armenians. Turkey’s refusal to even recognize the genocide is behind the continued tensions to this day. Alas, “Armenia’s Mount Ararat”  may have to await yemot meshiach as well.

The exodus of tens of thousands of Jews from or via Armenia to Israel since the fall of Communism appeared to doom efforts to preserve the community, which had dwindled to scarcely over 1,000 – many of them in mixed families, and almost none of them religious. Then, in one of history’s little tricks of the light, came Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Tens of thousands of mostly young and educated Russians fleeing the draft have alighted in the surprisingly vibrant and bustling Armenian capital of Yerevan, sending the price of everything from rentals to coffee skyrocketing, and giving a huge boost to the buzzing local IT sector.

And at least 2,000 of them are Jews, said Odessa-born Rimma Varzhapetyan-Feller, president of the Jewish community. Many of them register with the Jewish Agency via her office, meaning they may be intending to move on to Israel. Every six months, the Israeli consul responsible for Armenia, who is based in Tashkent, comes over “to stamp the papers,” she says.

With this, she proudly collaborates; indeed, her own children and family have mostly dispersed to Israel and the United States. But as with the rabbi, her goal appears to be keeping a flame alive in Yerevan.

I asked her whether the unpleasantness with Azerbaijan was not fueling antisemitism. Her answer was somewhat complex: yes, during outbreaks of violence there were some security threats, and a Holocaust monument in the city was defiled with red paint. But no, there is no particular antisemitism as such – if for no other reason that the Jews here are too few.

Our Jewish guide, Abel Simonyan, had a related but different take: Jews in Armenia are actually much appreciated because of the notion that their tribe wields magnificent global influence. That is, of course, widely considered an antisemitic trope, but it has its useful consequences: For a small, landlocked country of barely 3 million, beset from all sides by enemies and despots, it is an association too valuable to squander for the dubious joys of antisemitism.

But sometimes, when there is a flareup of violence with Azerbaijan, or when the Azeris cause particular damage with Israeli attack drones and the like, he does feel a certain “antagonistic feeling toward Israel.” Indeed, in recent days all Yerevan was abuzz with reports of infiltrations by Pegasus spyware produced by NSO, whose Israeli provenance never failed to be noted.

Simonyan, a 34-year-old whose family hails from Russia and Saloniki, is married to a non-Jewish Armenian and has two small children, a daughter and a boy. His future, he thinks, is here.

He enters the Cathedral of St Gregory the Illuminator and lights a series of liturgical candles, same as his fellow Armenians. It is Last Bell Day, a national commemoration of graduation, and the place is filled with students – as befits the main cathedral in a country that was the first, in 301 AD, to adopt Christianity. He crosses himself carefully as he exits the structure.

“I must visit Tel Aviv one day.”

TEHRAN- The value of Iran’s non-oil export to Armenia rose by 62.5 percent in the past Iranian calendar year 1401 (ended on March 20), from the preceding year.

As reported, Iran exported commodities worth $478 million to Armenia in 1401, while the figure was $294 million in 1400.

Liquefied natural gas, iron and steel rods, bitumen, light oils and related products, unalloyed iron and steel products, bituminous mineral oils, floor coverings, liquid cream, linear alkylbenzene, and rebar were Iran’s major products exported to Armenia in the past year.

Iranian Labor and Social Welfare Minister Solat Mortazavi has said Tehran and Yerevan are determined to use all their capacities to expand economic ties.

Mortazavi made the remarks in a meeting with his Armenian counterpart Narek Makratchian in Yerevan in late February.

Referring to the targeting of three billion dollars of annual trade between Iran and Armenia, Mortazavi said the development of all-out ties with Armenia is one of the priorities of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The minister stated that the main approach of the Iranian government is to advance economic diplomacy with neighboring countries, especially in the Caucasus region, adding: “Iran and Armenia's interactions in the economic, commercial, and investment fields are going to be diversified.”

“The Islamic Republic of Iran is ready to put all its facilities and capacities in the service of establishing peace and stability in the Caucasus region,” he said.

Makratchian for his part referred to the long-standing and friendly relations between the two countries and noted that the joint cooperation between the ministries of labor of Iran and Armenia in the field of social welfare, employment, well-being, and the development of technical and vocational training complexes will expand with the formation of joint specialized working groups.

“The Ministry of Labor of the Republic of Armenia is fully prepared to develop economic and social cooperation with the Ministry of Labor of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he stressed.

Mortazavi, who visited Yerevan on top of a high-ranking delegation, also met with Gnel Sanosyan, Armenia’s minister of territorial administration and infrastructures.

During this meeting, the minister expressed Iran’s readiness to cooperate with Armenia in all areas.

Iran and Armenia always enjoy very good friendly relations based on mutual respect and good neighborliness, he underlined.

The official emphasized the significance of Armenia for the Iranian foreign policy, saying that Armenia's role in the development of foreign relations and access to the Eurasian Union market is of prime importance for Iran.

He further mentioned some of the areas for mutual cooperation, saying that various projects in the fields of construction, road, tunnel digging, dam construction, urban development, energy infrastructure as well as technical and engineering services are among spheres of cooperation between Tehran and Yerevan.

The Armenian minister, for his part, said that the Armenian government pays special attention to the development of cooperation with the Islamic Republic in its five-year plan.

Iran and Armenia signed an MOU at the end of the two countries’ 17th meeting of the Joint Economic Committee in Yerevan last May.

The MOU, which covers cooperation in areas of transit, transportation, facilitation of exchange of goods, energy, development of environmental cooperation in the Aras area and removal of pollution from border rivers, as well as medical tourism, was signed by the Iranian Energy Minister Ali-Akbar Mehrabian and Armenian Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigoryan, who are the chairmen of the two countries’ Joint Economic Committee.

In that meeting, which was attended by a large number of deputy ministers, senior officials, ambassadors, and members of parliament of the two countries, the main issues that play a key role in the development of relations between the two countries were discussed.

According to the officials, the purpose of holding the 17th meeting of the Iran-Armenia Joint Economic Committee was the real and tangible development of relations between the two countries.

Among the issues raised at the meeting were transit, transportation, facilitation of trade, and broader cooperation in the field of energy.

MA