Armenia dismisses Spanish article announcing ‘Trump Corridor’ between Azerbaijan and exclave
The Armenian government has swiftly denied the validity of an article published on Tuesday in the Spanish tabloid Periodista Digital, which claimed it had received exclusive information about alleged US plans for a road between mainland Azerbaijan and its exclave Nakhchivan.
The ‘article has nothing to do with reality’ and is ‘another manifestation of hybrid warfare and manipulative propaganda’, the Armenian government’s Public Relations Department wrote on Wednesday. The government went on to accuse Periodista Digital of being a ‘website of dubious origin’.
Periodista Digital’s article alleged it had obtained the text of an agreement between Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the US to open a route, named the ‘Trump Bridge Transportation Corridor’, which would be owned by the US for 99 years and guarded by an American private military company.
The article was circulated by a number of Russian propagandists, including RT’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan, who has a long history of enmity with the current government in Yerevan. Simonyan, who is an ethnic Armenian herself, has been barred from entering Armenia, and recently drew attention for calling Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan the ‘antichrist’s anus’.
REVEALED: Puppet sultan Pashinyan signs secret memorandum to turn Armenia into American staging ground for future war with Iran.
— Margarita Simonyan (@M_Simonyan) July 23, 2025
Spain's Periodista Digital says it has obtained copy of agreement between Armenia, Azerbaijan and the US to create the "Trump Bridge Transportation… pic.twitter.com/MFgHbNFJT1
Responding to her comments, Armenia’s Parliamentary Speaker Alen Simonyan (no relation), called Margarita Simonyan ‘another vile creature from the freak circus’ and accused her of ‘spreading lies while simultaneously threatening the country and its people’.
In recent weeks, there have been a spate of conflicting reports about the possibility of US plans to create or manage a route connecting mainland Azerbaijan to Nakhchivan. While Armenia has confirmed that it has received such proposals, there has yet to be an official announcement by any of the countries involved that all sides have agreed upon one.
Yousef Bardouka
Earlier in July, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev rejected the notion that a potential route would be overseen by Armenian or other foreign border guards. In response, Pashinyan’s spokesperson, Nazeli Baghdasaryan, said ‘Armenia has never discussed, is not discussing, and will not discuss the terminology and subsequent logic put forth by the Azerbaijani president’.
For its part, when asked about the alleged plans, Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday that it was a ‘sovereign matter for Armenia and Azerbaijan’ and appeared not to directly respond to Periodista Digital’s reporting.
A pattern of Kremlin-backed disinformation
Armenian commentators and news outlets were quick to point out a history of criticism towards Periodista Digital’s reporting.
In 2019, the Spanish media outlet El Diario wrote an exposé about Periodista Digital, accusing it of creating fake authors with fabricated backgrounds.
Others drew attention to the author of the article in question, Josué Cárdenas, who has a long history of pro-Russian sentiment that is visible in both his writing in Periodista Digital and his social media accounts.
On the same day that Cárdenas published the article about the alleged ‘Trump Bridge Transportation Corridor’, he published another under the headline, ‘Will Moldova become a Ukraine 2.0?’ The article is full of oft-cited conspiracy theories about how shadowy-forces backed by the philanthropist George Soros installed President Maia Sandu and are planning to flood the country with migrants.
The article on the supposed transportation route itself is presented as straight news reporting, but nonetheless contains biased language and unsubstantiated accusations. In contrast to Pashinyan’s public turn to the West, Cárdenas wrote that ‘Pashinyan does not position himself as a ‘European’ political actor at all. He is actually a puppet in the hands of the US State Department and the Turkish government Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’. He further claimed that he was able to obtain a copy of the alleged agreement from anonymous members of the Armenian diaspora in France, and that the document had already been agreed upon in Yerevan, Baku, and Washington.
In 2024, Cárdenas travelled to Moscow to attend a conference of the International Russophile Movement, where he met with notorious Kremlin propagandist Aleksandr Dugin.
On X, Cárdenas has also made a number of pro-Kremlin statements, including claiming that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is being propagated by the US and EU’s ‘warmongering offensive’.
Armenian media noted that Cárdenas’ article was likely first spread by the Russian state-run media outlet Sputnik Armenia, and then circulated by opposition leaning Armenian outlets as well as pro-Russian Telegram accounts.
It is not the first time that disinformation campaigns with a pro-Russian bent have focused on Armenia — еаrlier in July, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Lab reported that Armenia was targeted by a ‘Kremlin-linked disinformation campaign’ that spread false claims of ‘US-backed biolabs conducting secret military experiments on civilians’.
Nate Ostiller
