https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/the-velvet-confession
The Velvet Confession
Unbekoming
Jun 24, 2026
I. The Congratulation

After the 2026 Armenian parliamentary election, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, issued a public statement congratulating Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. The statement included a single sentence that deserves to be read slowly.

*”The spirit of the Velvet Revolution you led in 2018 is alive and well.”*¹

A head of EU government, on the public record, congratulating a sitting head of state for leading the regime change operation that installed him.

There are normally rules about saying this kind of thing. Western foreign policy preserves a careful firewall between the operations its institutions run and the popular uprisings its diplomats describe. The activists are local. The funding is laundered. The slogans are organic. The footage is candid. The country fell on its own. That firewall has held, more or less, for the entire post-Cold War period.

Von der Leyen’s sentence walks straight through it.

The 2018 Velvet Revolution in Armenia was the operation that brought Pashinyan to power. The European Commission’s President says, in 2026, that he led it. That formulation, you led it, is what the funders and trainers have always denied. The uprising was popular, they have always said. The momentum was its own.

She is congratulating him for leading it.

This essay is about three documents that fit together. The first is the 2018 annual report of the United States National Endowment for Democracy, which celebrates the operation that installed Pashinyan and names the media outlets the NED paid for. The second is a 2019 report published by the RAND Corporation, the Pentagon’s principal research arm, which lays out in catalog form the policy measures the United States should pursue against Russia. One of those measures is titled “exploit tensions in the South Caucasus.” It names Armenia specifically. The third document is von der Leyen’s 2026 statement. The first is the receipt. The second is the plan. The third is what the system now allows itself to say out loud.

The three documents describe a continuous operation running from the 1990s to the present. The methodology has been documented in publicly available academic literature since 1973, deployed in over a dozen countries between 2000 and 2014, and codified as state strategy by a Pentagon-funded research corporation in 2019. The operation has a name. It used to be a secret. It is no longer being kept.

The reading that follows owes a direct debt to the independent geopolitical analyst Brian Berletic, whose June 15, 2026 article US Cements Political Capture of Armenia as it Advances “Extending Russia” Strategy, published at New Eastern Outlook and republished on his Land Destroyer blog, surfaced the von der Leyen statement, walked through the relevant NED annual reports, and mapped the Armenia section of Extending Russia onto the post-2018 Armenian political order. His framing of political capture, his documentary work on the funding architecture, and his readings from the RAND text supply much of the primary material this essay builds on.
Extending Russia
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II. The Receipt

The National Endowment for Democracy is a Washington-based organization created by an act of Congress in 1983. It is funded by an annual appropriation from the United States Treasury. Its founding president, Allen Weinstein, told the Washington Post in 1991:

*”A lot of what we do today was done covertly twenty-five years ago by the CIA.”*²

That is from the founding president of the NED, describing his own organization. It is not an accusation. It is a job description.

The NED publishes annual reports. The reports are available on its website. They name the countries the NED operates in, the organizations it funds, and the regime changes it considers successes.

The 2018 NED annual report includes a section on Armenia. The Endowment, describing its own work, writes:

*”NED’s many grantees in Armenia were in the forefront of the ‘Velvet Revolution’ last spring that swept from office a corrupt and autocratic president who wanted to manipulate the constitution to retain power. In subsequent elections held in December, the party alliance of the new Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan won 70 percent of the vote, setting the stage for building accountable and effective government ministries, reforming the judicial system, and strengthening the media as a critical watchdog over government performance.”*³

Several details deserve attention. The NED is not describing an Armenian achievement. It is describing the operational role its own grantees played, “in the forefront” of the events that brought Pashinyan to power. In the forefront is not arms-length language. It is admission language.

The decoded vocabulary is worth pausing over. Corrupt and autocratic, in NED prose, does not mean what it means in plain English. It means a government that has refused to subordinate itself to Washington at the expense of its own national interests. Accountable and effective government ministries does not mean accountable to Armenian voters. It means ministries accountable to, and effective at serving, Washington. Strengthening the media as a critical watchdog means strengthening media outlets the NED funds to act as a watchdog over any future Armenian government that might attempt to reverse the post-2018 order.

The same report indicates that the NED had been operating in Armenia since the 1990s, building a network of civil society organizations: funded, trained, networked, and gradually inserted into positions of institutional influence. The Velvet Revolution was the moment that network consolidated into governing power. Pashinyan was the candidate it was ready to install. The NED’s “setting the stage” formulation is what an imperial administration writes when it has finished installing a replacement government and is preparing to manage the consolidation phase.

The 2019 NED annual report, published the following year, describes the next phase. The Endowment writes that *”since the 2018 revolution in Armenia, NED grantees have shifted their focus from holding a corrupt regime accountable to supporting governance reform.”*⁴ The same report adds a sentence that quietly describes what governance reform actually means in practice.

*”Several NED grantees have entered government.”*⁵

This is the pipeline made operational. The activists trained in NED-funded programs, working at NED-funded NGOs, distributing NED-funded media, did not stop being NED-connected when their protest movement won. They moved into the ministries.

The 2021 annual financial report of one such organization, the Armenia-based Union of Informed Citizens, is publicly available. Its revenue-and-expenditure table lists, by name, the National Endowment for Democracy (multiple grants), the Open Society Foundation, the International Republican Institute, Freedom House, and the United States Embassy in Armenia (twice) as funders.⁶ These are not anonymous donors. The funding architecture is identified by the recipient organization, in its own published accounts, and it consists almost entirely of United States government bodies and a single American billionaire’s foundation.

There is also Boon TV, an Armenian television station which broadcasts to an Armenian-speaking audience, presents itself as an Armenian outlet, and is funded by the European Endowment for Democracy, the EU’s analogue to the NED. The European Union’s own EU Neighbours East portal carries an article describing Boon TV as the Armenian station “giving people a voice and space to speak,” noting in passing that the station operates with European Endowment for Democracy support.⁷

The 2020 report of the National Democratic Institute, one of the NED’s principal operational subsidiaries, describes its Armenia programming in operational language: an internship pipeline at the National Assembly, the Katarine Women’s Political Leadership Program, the Young Political Leadership Strategy Program.⁸ These are cadre-construction programs. They identify young Armenians, train them in the methodology and ideology of the funder, network them into Western institutional circles, and return them to Armenia to take positions in politics, media, law, and education.

None of this is alleged. It is reported, in the funders’ own publications, by name, with budget figures.

The reason von der Leyen could write what she wrote in 2026, you led the Velvet Revolution, is that everyone in the room already knows. The receipts are filed. The annual reports are bound. The confession is not really a confession. It is the official record finally catching up to itself.
III. The Plan

In April 2019, the RAND Corporation published a 354-page research report titled *Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground.*⁹ The report was prepared for the United States Army.

RAND is a non-profit research corporation founded in 1946 as Project RAND by the United States Army Air Forces, spun off in 1948 as an independent organization, and substantially funded since then by the Department of Defense, the intelligence community, and the federal civilian agencies. Its research builds the analytical infrastructure on which American national security policy is constructed. Thomas Schelling worked there. Herman Kahn worked there. The architecture of Cold War nuclear strategy was largely a RAND product.

Extending Russia is not a leak. It is not a classified document. It is on rand.org, available to anyone with an internet connection.

The report’s organizing premise is straightforward. Russia, the authors argue, has limited resources and competing commitments. The United States can weaken Russia by extending it: forcing it to commit those limited resources to defending itself simultaneously across multiple theaters, while increasing the costs of each commitment. The report catalogs policy measures by domain (economic, geopolitical, ideological and informational, air and space, maritime, and land and multi-domain) and assesses each for likelihood of success, expected costs, and expected benefits.

The geopolitical measures section opens with the following items. Provide lethal aid to Ukraine. Increase support to the Syrian rebels. Promote regime change in Belarus. Exploit tensions in the South Caucasus. Reduce Russian influence in Central Asia. Challenge Russian presence in Moldova.

Each of these items has, since 2019, been implemented.

The Trump administration approved the transfer of lethal aid to Ukraine in 2017, and deliveries scaled through 2018 and 2019, the same year the RAND paper was published.¹⁰ Support to the armed opposition in Syria, which had been running since 2011, continued until the Syrian government collapsed in late 2024. The Belarusian operation was attempted in 2020 and has been re-attempted at intervals since. The Nord Stream pipelines were destroyed in September 2022. Moldova has been pulled into an increasingly confrontational posture toward Russia under President Maia Sandu. And the tensions in the South Caucasus have been exploited.

The South Caucasus measure (Measure 4 in the geopolitical chapter) is where Armenia appears by name. The report’s analysis runs along the following lines, paraphrased from the published text. The United States could pursue closer relationships with Georgia and Azerbaijan, including expanded NATO cooperation, which would likely prompt Russia to strengthen its military presence in South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Armenia, and southern Russia, committing Russian resources to a region from which they cannot be easily redeployed. The alternative, the report states, is that the United States could try to induce Armenia to break with Russia.¹¹

That second clause is the one that matters. The paper, dated 2019, written for the Army, identifies inducing Armenia to break with Russia as a recommended policy measure.

The Velvet Revolution that installed Pashinyan, the candidate who has since steered Armenia’s foreign policy away from Russia and toward the European Union, ran in 2018.

The codification post-dates the deployment. RAND was writing down what had already been operationalized.

The report goes on to describe the secondary benefits of capturing Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan’s geography, it notes, makes it the prime location for both intelligence gathering and deterrence measures relating to Iran, particularly because of the concentration of ethnic Azeri and Kurdish populations near the Azeri-Iranian border. Closer ties with Georgia could pay strategic dividends in future conflicts. And the Caspian Sea remains a major producer of oil and natural gas. The United States Department of Energy, the report notes, estimates 48 billion barrels of oil and 292 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in proved and probable reserves in the Caspian basins, with three quarters of the oil and two thirds of the natural gas concentrated within 100 miles of the coast.¹²

The paper is explicit about the strategic prize. Capturing the South Caucasus extends Russia. It encircles Iran. It provides access to one of the largest hydrocarbon basins in Eurasia. Armenia is named. The objectives are stated.

A reader who has not encountered this kind of document before might pause here and consider what they are looking at. The Pentagon’s principal research corporation, in a report prepared for the United States Army, has published a policy menu for weakening another nation-state. The menu includes inducing a third nation-state to break its alliance. The third nation-state is named. The financial prize is quantified in cubic feet of natural gas.

The defender’s objection at this point is that RAND publishes policy menus on dozens of countries every year, and the appearance of “exploit tensions in the South Caucasus” in a 2019 paper is not the same as the United States ordering Pashinyan’s installation in 2018. The objection concedes the point. The catalog exists. The deployment in Armenia matches the catalog. Whether RAND wrote the menu or recorded it makes little difference to the diner who is reading from it.

This is not how the foreign policy of a self-described rules-based international order is supposed to be conducted, or, at minimum, not how it is supposed to be documented.

It is documented anyway.
IV. The Genealogy

The methodology RAND described in 2019 was not invented in 2019. It has a paper trail running back six decades. The bulk of it is academic.

In the 1960s, a young American researcher named Gene Sharp completed a doctoral thesis at the University of Oxford titled The Politics of Nonviolent Action. The work was based at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs, the academic node where Henry Kissinger, Samuel Huntington, and Thomas Schelling overlapped during their formative years, and the institution which, more than any other, supplied the intellectual scaffolding of American Cold War strategy. Sharp’s thesis was published as a three-volume book in 1973. The introduction was written by Schelling: RAND nuclear strategist, CIA consultant, and the author of the 1960 Strategy of Conflict that defined American deterrence theory.¹³

The 1973 volumes catalog 198 methods of non-violent action, sequenced from preliminary methods (public speeches, symbolic colors, marches) through intermediate methods (consumer boycotts, work stoppages, civil disobedience) to terminal methods such as dual sovereignty and parallel government. The catalog is operationally complete. It describes how to begin a campaign, how to escalate, and how to finish with the replacement of the existing political authority.

In 1983, Sharp founded the Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) in Boston. In 1993, at the request of a Burmese exile editor, he produced a 93-page operational manual titled *From Dictatorship to Democracy.*¹⁴ The manual was first distributed in Burmese. By 2008, on Sharp’s own published count, it had been translated into 28 languages: Belarusian, Burmese, Tibetan, Farsi, Georgian, Ukrainian, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Arabic, Pashto, and others. The list maps almost exactly onto the geography of the regime change operations the United States was conducting in those years.

The operational arm of the framework was a US Army colonel named Robert Helvey, who had spent his career at the Defense Intelligence Agency and who served as US military attaché in Rangoon in the mid-1980s. Helvey trained the Serbian student organization Otpor at the Budapest Hilton in 1999, using Sharp’s manuals as the curriculum.¹⁵ Otpor brought down Slobodan Milošević in October 2000. The Otpor leadership subsequently founded the Centre for Applied NonViolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), which became the global training academy for what came to be called color revolutions.

Between 2000 and 2014, the franchise was deployed in at least fourteen documented operations: Belgrade in 2000, Tbilisi in 2003, Kiev in 2004, Bishkek and Beirut in 2005, Rangoon in 2007, Lhasa in 2008, Tehran in 2009, Tunis and Cairo in 2011, Tripoli and Damascus also in 2011, Hong Kong in 2014, and the Maidan operation in 2014. Each followed a similar template: a branded student organization with a clenched-fist logo, a single-word slogan, choreographed Western media coverage, the same Belgrade-trained CANVAS network, and funding routed through the NED, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Freedom House, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

A November 2004 article in The Guardian by Ian Traynor described the Ukrainian operation of that year as

*”an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.”*¹⁶

That is The Guardian, in 2004. The newspaper named the operation, named the four countries, and described the methodology. A Ukrainian Pora activist named Oleh Kyriyenko told Radio Netherlands the same year:

*”The bible of Pora has been the book of Gene Sharp, also used by Otpor, it’s called: From Dictatorship to Democracy. Pora activists have translated it by themselves. We have written to Mr Sharp and to the Albert Einstein Institution in the United States, and he became very sympathetic towards our initiative, and the Institution provided funding to print over 12,000 copies of this book for free.”*¹⁷

A Pora leader, in a 2004 interview, naming the manual, the author, and the funder. The operational pipeline in plain language.

The methodology was therefore, by 2014, documented in The Guardian, named by its own activists in radio interviews, admitted by its founding NGO president as the successor to covert CIA work, and operationally deployed in over a dozen countries.

What changed in 2019 was the institutional location of the documentation.

Sharp’s manuals were academic publications and NGO field materials. They lived in the world of philanthropic foundations, exile networks, and university libraries. They were distributable as PDFs from a Boston basement. They were the kind of document that could be dismissed as a private researcher’s work, even when the researcher’s introduction was written by a RAND strategist and his field operative was a retired DIA colonel.

The 2019 Extending Russia paper is something different. It is a research report by the Pentagon’s principal research corporation, prepared on contract for the United States Army, cataloging as state-recommended policy the same regime change methodology that had previously circulated through the NGO sector. The manual moved up the institutional ladder. The activist pamphlet became the Army’s reading list.

This is the qualitative shift. The color revolutions of the 2000s were the field tests. Extending Russia is the doctrine document. What used to be conducted through plausibly-deniable NGOs, with an academic legend about the moral force of non-violence as cover, is now written into a Pentagon research report as state policy, with named target countries and quantified strategic prizes.

The deniability layer was the entire point. The deniability layer has thinned.
V. The Pattern, Updated

The color revolutions of 2000–2014 were broadly single-event operations. Protest cycle. Disputed election. Western media saturation. Resignation or flight. Replacement government. The cycle measured in months.

The Armenia operation is something else. It is a continuous administrative construction project that began in the 1990s and has not ended. The NED has been operating in Armenia for over three decades, building NGOs, training media operators, financing leadership programs, identifying young political talent, and quietly placing trained personnel into Armenian institutions year after year.

The 2018 Velvet Revolution was the moment the administrative layer consolidated into governing power. It was not the operation’s beginning. It was the operation’s first political consolidation. The 2026 election that prompted von der Leyen’s congratulation is the second consolidation, the cementing of the post-revolutionary order eight years on.

This is what the color revolution franchise has become. The old model (overthrow the government, install the replacement, leave) produced unstable client states which often reverted at the next election. Viktor Yushchenko, installed in Ukraine in 2004, lost re-election in 2010 with five percent of the vote. Mikheil Saakashvili, installed in Georgia in 2003, was charged with abuse of office and fled the country in 2014. Mohamed Morsi, installed in Egypt in 2012, was deposed in 2013. The franchise produced color but not durability.

The post-2018 Armenian model is the franchise re-engineered for permanence. The protest cycle still happens. The Velvet Revolution ran the standard template, with branded youth movements, choreographed media coverage, and the by-now-traditional Western narrative of popular awakening. But the protest is no longer the operation. The protest is the moment the operation surfaces. The operation is the thirty-year administrative construction project that preceded it, and the continuous funding of NGOs, media, and political programs that has continued since.

The 2019 NED admission, several NED grantees have entered government, describes a state of affairs in which the boundary between civil society and the government itself has been erased. The civil society organizations the NED funds produce the politicians the NED-funded media celebrate, who govern through ministries staffed by NED-trained personnel, who legislate in directions the NED funds NGOs to advocate.

There is no longer a separate Armenian political class that the operation needs to install over. The operation has become the political class.

This is what independent analysts have begun to call political capture: the displacement of indigenous political institutions by an externally-built administrative apparatus.¹⁸ Whether one accepts the broader framework that surrounds the term or not, the documentary record on Armenia supports the narrower claim. The NED’s own annual reports describe the construction of a parallel administrative network. The 2019 admission describes that network entering government. The 2021 financial disclosures document the continuing funding pipeline. The 2026 election cements the result.

The pattern that ran from Belgrade to Maidan was the franchise’s first phase. The pattern that runs from 2018 Armenia onward is its second phase. The first phase produced regime change. The second phase produces something closer to permanent administration.
VI. The Strategic Object

Armenia is a country of approximately three million people, with no oil, no significant mineral wealth, and an economy roughly the size of a mid-sized American city. Without an external strategic logic, the level of investment the United States has made in capturing it makes no sense.

The strategic logic is supplied, in full, by the 2019 RAND paper.

Armenia sits in a position from which three United States campaigns converge.

The first is the weakening of Russia. Armenia was for three decades a member of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the post-Soviet security architecture that operates as the eastern counterpart to NATO. Armenia formally suspended its participation in CSTO in early 2024. A CSTO that loses its southern Caucasus member is materially diminished.

The second campaign is the encirclement of Iran. Armenia shares a border with Iran. A Western-aligned Armenian government provides intelligence positioning, potential basing, and a northern axis of pressure on Tehran. This is the same strategic logic that the 2009 Brookings Institution paper Which Path to Persia? laid out for the encirclement of Iran.¹⁹
Which Path To Persia
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The third campaign is the Caspian energy basin. Armenia is adjacent to one of the largest hydrocarbon zones in Eurasia, the reserves of which RAND quantifies in cubic feet of natural gas and barrels of oil. The United States has been seeking for three decades to break Russian and Iranian dominance of the pipelines that carry those resources to market.

Armenia is, in the strategic terms of the RAND paper, a position in three campaigns at once.

This is the deeper continuity. The color revolutions of 2000–2014 were not, individually, about democracy. Each operation served a position in one or more campaigns: pipeline corridors, military basing, monetary alternatives, the encirclement of Russia, China, or Iran. The strategic spine of every operation from Belgrade to Maidan was the maintenance of American dollar-denominated control over Eurasian energy flows and the prevention of any Eurasian integration outside Anglo-American financial architecture. The color was the branding. The pipeline was the prize.

Armenia is the same operation, in a different country, against the same rivals. RAND simply wrote it down.

The Russians have a phrase for what has been done to them. They call it political technology (politicheskaya tekhnologiya), and they have been documenting it since the late 1990s. The Chinese have been documenting it since at least the early 2010s. A 2024 white paper from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, titled The National Endowment for Democracy: What It Is and What It Does, lays out the NED’s operations against China, Russia, Iran, and a dozen other targeted nations in operational detail.²⁰ Both governments understand the operation. Both have defended themselves against it.

Neither has succeeded in defending its smaller partners. Armenia, sitting on Russia’s southern border with a thirty-year-old NED network inside it, has now been captured. The same is being attempted in Moldova, in Belarus, in Kyrgyzstan, in Georgia.

The franchise is running.
VII. The Unnoticed Confession

The four documents discussed in this essay now sit in front of you.

The 1991 admission by NED’s founding president that the organization does, openly, what the CIA used to do covertly.

The 2018 NED annual report celebrating the beginning of the Pashinyan era and naming the Armenian media outlets the United States paid for.

The 2019 RAND Corporation report listing the inducement of Armenia’s break with Russia as a recommended policy measure for the United States Army, and quantifying the Caspian energy prize in cubic feet of natural gas.

The 2026 statement from the President of the European Commission congratulating Nikol Pashinyan for leading the Velvet Revolution.

A reader who has been told for two decades that color revolutions are popular uprisings, that the protesters are ordinary citizens responding to genuine grievances, that the Western media coverage is independent reporting, and that the regimes which fall do so because their populations have spontaneously rejected them, is owed an explanation for why all four of these documents exist, why they are all publicly available, and why they all say what they say.

The explanation is that the operation has been confessed in its own documents for years. The 1991 admission is in the Washington Post. The 2018 annual report is on ned.org. The 2019 RAND paper is on rand.org. Von der Leyen’s 2026 statement is on her official social media account. None of this is hidden. The plausible-deniability layer that the franchise was built around (the local activists, the laundered funding, the publicly-available manual, the spontaneous uprising) has held only because most readers have not been looking. The documents themselves have not been hidden. They have only been ignored.

When the next color revolution arrives, in Tbilisi or Chișinău or Bishkek or wherever the franchise next deploys, the documents to read will be the same documents. The annual report of whichever NED-funded NGO sits at the center of the protests. The most recent RAND policy paper for the target region. The congratulatory message that will arrive eight years later from whichever Western head of government takes credit.

The franchise has stopped pretending.

The documents are still there to read.
VIII. How to Explain It to a 6 Year Old

There is a big country far away that wants things that are inside smaller countries. Oil, gas, places to put soldiers, friends near its enemies.

The big country worked out a recipe a long time ago. It builds clubs inside the smaller countries. It pays for the clubs for many, many years. The clubs make newspapers and television shows. They run training camps for clever young people. The clever young people grow up reading the newspapers the big country paid for and going to the training camps the big country paid for.

When the time is right, the big country tells the clubs to start protests. The clever young people come out onto the streets. The newspapers say the protests are wonderful. The cameras show the protests from the best angles. Famous people in other countries say nice things about the protests on television.

The leader of the smaller country gets confused, or scared, or pushed out. A new leader takes over. The new leader is one of the clever young people from the training camps. The new leader does what the big country wants.

Years later, after everyone has stopped paying attention, the leader of another big country writes a message congratulating the new leader for the protests. The message says, you led the revolution. The message is on the internet, where anyone can read it.

The recipe is in a book. The book has been printed in twenty-eight languages. There is also a longer book that the big country’s army keeps on its desk, which lists which countries to use the recipe on next.

This is the recipe. These are the books.

You can read them yourself.