The 47-year-old man, Vartan Ghukasian, is a former police officer who emigrated to the United States about a decade ago. He has since attracted large audiences on YouTube with his hard-hitting and opinionated comments on political developments in Armenia. He has commonly used extreme profanities to attack both Armenia’s current rulers and their mainstream political opponents in his videos.
In early 2023, Armenian law-enforcement authorities issued an international arrest warrant for Ghukasian and arrested his associates in Armenia on charges of blackmail, extortion and fraud denied by them. That did not prevent Ghukasian from helping Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s party install its candidate as mayor of Yerevan as a result of a municipal election held in September 2023.
The Public Voice party unofficially led by Ghukasian garnered 10 percent of the vote in the Armenian capital thanks to his populist appeal. The blogger, who is better known with his English nickname Dog, subsequently fell out with most senior members of Public Voice and set up a new party called DOK.
In a Facebook post, the party said on Thursday that it lost contact with its leader about a week ago and still does not know his whereabouts. It said afterwards that “Vartan Ghukasian is now in confinement but does not have the status of a detainee.” It gave no details.
The official website of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security reveals that an Armenian man with the same name and of the same age is currently held at the Henderson Detention Center in the U.S. state of Nevada. It does not specify what he is accused or suspected of. Illegal immigrants are understood to be among the facility’s 500 or so inmates.
Levon Baghdasarian, a lawyer representing Ghukasian in Armenia, shed little light on his client’s current status and whereabouts when he spoke to RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Friday. Baghdasarian said that Ghukasian has not been formally placed under arrest and may have only had his freedom “partially restricted.” The DOK leader is being investigated over a “migration issue,” the lawyer said vaguely.
DOK activists announced, meanwhile, that they have started collecting signatures in support of their calls for the U.S. government not to extradite Ghukasian to Armenia. They claimed that their leader could be tortured or ill-treated otherwise by Armenian investigators. The latter did not react to his apparent detention in the U.S.