Prime Minister's Office Urges State Institutions to Abandon Mail.ru Email Addresses

The newspaper "Hraparak" reports: "The Armenian authorities are smoothly withdrawing from the sphere of Russian influence and moving towards the Western domain. About two weeks ago, Arayik Harutyunyan, the head of the Prime Minister's office, sent letters to state institutions at the suggestion of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, recommending that they give up using mail.ru email addresses.

The Foreign Ministry's letter states: 'We inform you that a significant number of employees of Armenian state institutions continue to provide personal email addresses instead of the official email addresses of their departments for communication with international partners in bilateral and multilateral formats. The provided email addresses often have the mail.ru domain. Considering that EU institutions avoid, and recently have also ceased to conduct official correspondence with email addresses having the "ru" domain, we ask for your directive to all state agencies to provide departmental email addresses during communications with the EU, participation in events organized by the EU, and other related communications, and to avoid the use of personal addresses, especially those with the "ru" domain.'