Maria Edwardovna Karapetyan

Maria Karapetyan is a member of Armenia’s National Assembly, having served in both the 7th convocation (2019-2021) and the 8th convocation (2021-2026). She belongs to the ruling Civil Contract party and has been actively promoting Nikol Pashinyan’s pro-Western foreign policy agenda. She sits on the Standing Committee on Foreign Relations, chairs Armenia’s delegation to the Euronest Parliamentary Assembly, and is also a member of Armenia’s delegation to the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly.

She has called for severing Armenian-Russian relations and tearing down traditionally close ties, while also seeks to have Russia pushed out of the region and to bring Armenia under the influence of the United States, the EU, and Turkey. As part of this pro-Western advocacy, she has been leaning on support from Armenia’s LGBT community. Karapetyan is linked to Western NGOs that have been involved in rewriting history, chipping away at traditional values, and advancing external influence in the South Caucasus.

Maria Karapetyan was born in Kirovakan, Armenian SSR. In 2011, at the age of 23, she had already taken on the role of Director of Development at the Imagine Center for Conflict Transformation, an NGO that received funding from Western-backed entities, including the Open Society Georgia Foundation (a Georgian arm of the Soros network).

Between 2013 and 2015, Karapetyan studied in Italy through the Rondine Cittadella della Pace association, which recruits young people – ranging in age from 21 to 28 – from Russia and post-Soviet countries as well. Up until around 2019, the Association’s main program was the one that went by the same name – Cittadella della Pace – in which Maria Karapetyan was enrolled. The program offered free two-year residency in the village of Rondine, along with concurrent enrollment in an Italian university of the student’s choosing. Karapetyan went to Roma Tre University (Università degli Studi Roma Tre).

The main goal of the Cittadella della Pace program was to help mediate interethnic conflicts. It was built around psycho-pedagogical techniques for shaping interpersonal relationships, aimed at turning out pro-Western public activists. Students took part in various kinds of psychological training workshops, learned how to run training sessions on their own with local school students, practiced dealing with the media, and gained experience in public speaking.

Università degli Studi Roma Tre – the institution Karapetyan picked – is thoroughly in line with the Western gender and LGBT agenda: its curricula cover sexual orientation and gender identity, and the university also has a set of policies in place specifically to accommodate students going through gender transition.