Does a real video show Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan punching a child in the face? No, that's not true: The clip was digitally altered. The original footage from Pashinyan's visit to a kindergarten showed him hugging the child, not punching him.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X by @TheQNewsPatriot on June 3, 2026. The caption said:
Ladies and gentlemen, the Prime Minister of Armenia.
This is what the video attached to the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @TheQNewsPatriot on X.)
One indicator that the video was not authentic was that the children in the background showed no reaction to the supposed punch, which runs counter to typical human behavior.
When Lead Stories manually reviewed the moment of the punch, it became evident that the appearance of Pashinyan's hand was consistent with the glitches characteristic of AI. As the composite image below shows, his hand becomes transparent and shape-shifts, losing fingers:
(Image source: post by @TheQNewsPatriot on X.)
The real recording of Pashinyan's visit to the kindergarten was published on May 30, 2025. It included no such scene. At the 00:47 mark (archived here and here), Pashinyan hugs the child:
(Image source: YouTube.)
A search across Google News (archived here) in English showed no journalistic articles covered the incident.
Lead Stories also searched (archived here) Armenian-language news sources but found no such coverage:
(Image source: Google.)
