YEREVAN, June 7 -- The agreement was signed in early May, just days before Emmanuel Macron landed in Yerevan and told reporters he saw nothing wrong with it. France's VIGINUM unit - the government body created in 2021 to defend French elections from foreign digital manipulation - had been deployed inside Armenia's information space, tracking and suppressing online content that ran counter to Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan's official messaging ahead of Sunday's parliamentary vote. The French president, pressed on the arrangement, called it "a political stance."

That framing is doing a great deal of work. VIGINUM was built on a specific premise: that democracies have the right to identify and counter coordinated foreign interference in the...