Narek Karapetyan, the nephew of jailed Russian–Armenian tycoon Samvel Karapetyan, has appeared on the talk show of influential far-right US pundit and conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson to discuss his uncle’s criminal case and claims the Armenian government is cracking down on the Armenian Apostolic Church.
During the show, which was published on Sunday, Narek Karapetyan, Carlson, and Robert Amsterdam — Samvel Karapetyan’s lawyer — criticised the government of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and accused him of being ‘intent on destroying traditional Christianity or the church’.
Narek Karapetyan claimed that Pashinyan is trying to make Armenia ‘less Christian’, while Carlson, without citing any sources, alleged that Pashinyan is ‘focusing on transgenderism as a good thing [and the] LGBTQ agenda, whatever that is’.
Samvel Karapetyan, owner of the Russia-based Tashir Group conglomerate and one of Armenia’s wealthiest figures, was arrested in June on charges of inciting ‘public calls to seize power’ after publicly defending the Armenian Apostolic Church during a government dispute with the clergy.
From jail, he founded the Our Way (Mer Dzevov) political movement, which his nephew is also involved in. The movement is expected to field candidates to compete against Pashinyan and his ruling Civil Contract party in the 2026 parliamentary elections.
After his arrest, Samvel Karapetyan acquired Amsterdam and his law firm as legal counsel. Amsterdam and his law firm have taken on a variety of high-profile clients in human rights cases around the world, including Russian dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Georgian businessperson Giorgi Bachiashvili, a former aide of Georgian Dream’s billionaire founder Bidzina Ivanishvili. Amsterdam has also represented the Turkish government, and more recently, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP), which has been accused of maintaining links with the Russian Orthodox Church, an organisation closely linked with the Kremlin.
It is unclear how much Amsterdam is being paid to represent Karapetyan.
Ahead of the show, there were unconfirmed rumours that Carlson had been paid $400,000 to air the interview, which the Our Way movement has disputed.
OC Media has not been able to confirm the veracity of the claims.
The ‘global war on Christianity’
Amsterdam had previously joined Carlson’s show to discuss his allegations that the Ukrainian government is persecuting the UOC-MP, claims he repeated during his most recent appearance. A video of the episode released by Carlson’s media outlet showed what were purported to be UOC-MP churches being burned by authorities linked to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi, but were actually churches struck by Russian shelling. Another one of the churches on fire in the video was a Ukrainian Greek Catholic church that caught fire in Canada in 2014.
Amsterdam linked his allegations about Ukraine and the UOC-MP — which have been vigorously denied by the Ukrainian government and other media outlets — to Pashinyan’s own dispute with the Armenian Apostolic Church. He also accused the US of allowing both the attacks on the UOC-MP and the Armenian Apostolic Church to continue, claiming the US State Department has ‘instrumentalised religion as a tool of foreign policy’.
Throughout the almost 1.5 hour show, Narek Karapetyan, Carlson, and Amsterdam cast both the current dispute between Pashinyan and the church and the wider conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan as being symptomatic of a global war against Christianity. Both Carlson and Karapetyan repeatedly implied the wars over Nagorno-Karabakh were about Christian Armenia vs. Islamic Azerbaijan, rather than wars over territory and ethnicity, which most scholars about the region have agreed were the primary motivators.
Another narrative that Carlson focused on was Israeli support for Azerbaijan.
Following claims by Narek Karapetyan that Israeli drone operators were directly involved in combat against Armenian forces, Carlson said, ‘so that would mean that Israelis were killing Christians in this war with US tax dollars’.
‘I just suppose from an American perspective it’s like, why are my tax dollars being used to murder Christians around the world’, Carlson said.
Breaking with the Republican Party that he has long been a member of and promoted, Carlson has repeatedly criticised Israel in recent years, including regularly referencing Israeli military supplies to Azerbaijan.
In a July 2025 interview with the prominent ostensibly leftist commentator Ana Kasparian, Carlson used the same narrative, asserting that ‘Israel sold weapons to Azerbaijan to kill the Christians’.
The episode has been widely promoted by Armenian diaspora media, including the prominent lobbying group the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA).
Just two days after its release, the video has racked up almost 400,000 views on YouTube alone.
Arshaluys Barseghyan
