Russia Captures Another ‘Draft Dodger’ In Armenia Ազատություն Ռադիոկայան
Day: April 9, 2024
Armenia women’s national soccer team in the locker room (Photo: Maral Artin)
The Armenia women’s national soccer team just scored its most significant result in recent memory – more than 13 years to be exact.
Armenia secured a 3-2 away victory against Bulgaria in the UEFA women’s Euro 2025 qualifiers after Ani Safaryan netted a 91st minute winner in Sofia. This win marks the national team’s first since June 12, 2021 when they beat Kazakhstan 2-1 in a friendly match.
Armenia’s last win in a UEFA qualification tournament was over 13 years ago when the women’s side earned a 1-0 win over Faroe Islands on March 3, 2011. Gayane Kostanyan was the lone goal scorer.
The game started with Armenia finding control and the eventual advantage before halftime thanks to Lara Kazandjian’s 43rd minute goal. 17-year-old Maneh Nersesyan assisted the game’s opener to give Armenia a 1-0 halftime lead.
In the early goings of the second half, Armenia doubled its advantage with a 49th minute goal from Veronika Asatryan, which was assisted by national team captain Maral Artin. Armenia looked to be cruising to a comfortable victory in its second Euro 2025 qualifier after dropping its first game to Romania 0-5.
“So after the 1-0 we just said we need to keep going, and we believed we can! We scored 2-0, and we knew we will step out of this field as a winner,” Artin told the Weekly.
But the match was far from over.
Bulgaria found its second wind and powered its way to a consolation goal in the 62nd minute from Polina Rasina before a penalty was awarded to the home side. Evdokiya Popadinova tucked in a penalty kick in the 85th minute to tie up the contest at 2-2.
“Even though they scored 2-2, until the last minute, we screamed at each other on the field, ‘This is our game, we are going to win, we are going to win,’” Artin said.
With the match winding down and added time commencing, Armenia found a way to net a game-winning goal in the 91st minute thanks to 18-year-old Safaryan.
“When I received that ball, I honestly wasn’t thinking. I think that’s when the magic happens – when you just play. I was in disbelief when I saw the ball in the back of the net. My friends joked that I need to improve my celebration,” match-winner Safaryan said to the Weekly.
Armenia women’s national soccer team celebrating its victory (Photo: Maneh Nersesyan)
Safaryan found herself on the left side of the pitch where two Bulgarian defenders were closing her down. She showed resilience, cutting inside the penalty box on her right foot and finishing a sweet goal in the bottom right hand corner.
“It was really a team effort though, so naturally I just had to hug everyone nearby. It was a really emotional experience. No one really believed in us. Everyone expected we would lose another game. But we wanted this bad, and we got it. Beyond proud of this team,” Safaryan said.
Asatryan tallied an assist on that goal, giving her two goal contributions that night.
“I am so incredibly proud of this team and proud to represent Armenia. This win means so much to all of us! We left it all on the field today,” goalscorer Kazandjian told the Weekly.
The full-time whistle sounded, and the celebrations ensued. Multiple national team players took to social media to post photos and videos from their locker room celebrations.
“We were just proud of ourselves. Every single person today in our team believed we can! We just felt pride. On the tribune there were a few Armenians. We just screamed Hayastan, and a lot of girls cried. This is the big step we needed, and we will continue,” Artin said.
Nersesyan and Safaryan are Armenian-Americans who are part of the young crop of talent rising to the senior national team. In 2022, both players led the Armenian U17 women’s team to its first-ever win in a 3-0 result against Georgia. Nersesyan notched two goals and one assist in that match.
Those same young women have now left their mark on the senior squad in defeating Bulgaria, with Nersesyan tallying an assist in 97 minutes played and Safaryan grabbing the match-winning goal off the bench.
“Unbelievable emotions and pride representing our entire nation,” Nersesyan told the Weekly. “I think some of the pictures from IG (Instagram) from our locker room say it all.”
“Me as a captain, I am proud of every single player in our team, bench or starting 11, because I know how hard we fought for this win! We deserved it earlier, but today was the perfect day. It couldn’t be better than a big game like this, 2-3 against a really good team,” Artin said.
Armenia now shifts its focus to the next set of qualification matches. The road to Switzerland will see the national team take on Kazakhstan at home on May 31 and away from home on June 4.
Author information
Jason Takhtadjian
Jason Takhtadjian is a reporter, producer and weekend anchor at KCAU-TV in Sioux City, Iowa. Takhtadjian began college pursuing Mechanical Engineering with a focus on Aerospace until deciding to pursue a sports broadcast career after one semester at the University of Nevada – Las Vegas. While at UNLV, Takhtadjian worked on his own weekly radio show/podcast covering soccer and basketball, produced his own sports debate show, was part of the university’s weekly sports show “The Rebel Report” and was the play-by-play commentator for UNLV men’s and women’s soccer and basketball, to name a few. When the COVID-19 pandemic started, Jason was graduating college and had to pivot to the world of general news to land a job. Three years after accepting a job in the middle of the United States with no Armenian community, Takhtadjian accepted a reporter position at KSEE in Fresno, California. The 26-year-old also worked as a contributor for Armenian Sports News, helping grow the page by thousands of followers in less than a year of work.
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This is new to me and confusing because it’s not one of the tasks on the rewards dashboard. It’s three questions and I went through it twice because it still showed up after I completed it the first time. Confusingly, I appeared to receive 10 points just from clicking the tile and then no points after completing the quiz (so maybe you need to get the correct answers which I did not.)
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, EU High Representative / Vice-President Josep Borrell, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken at their April 5, 2024 meeting in Brussels (Photo: RA Prime Minister’s office)
The highly-anticipated meeting between high-ranking European and U.S. officials and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan took place in Brussels last Friday. Armenians hyped up the meeting with excitement long before it was held.
Some Armenians speculated vainly that Armenia would soon join the European Union, while others went as far as predicting Armenia would become a NATO member.
While Armenians are a wonderful people, they have had a major shortcoming during their entire history, which is the lack of skill in diplomacy.
Even while Armenians suffered from invasions, occupation, massacres and even genocide, they never understood that no foreign power would ever come to their rescue. They kept hoping that some country would save them, as if anyone had an obligation to do so. If Armenians never bothered to defend their own land, why would an outsider do such a thing? How can foreigners be more concerned about Armenia’s security and well-being than Armenians themselves?
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Armenians kept on believing for thousands of years the fairy tale that someone would come to their rescue. More recently, most Armenians believed that should they find themselves in real danger, Russia would save them. Naturally, this is the continuation of a longstanding wishful thinking. Despite Armenian expectations, when Russia did not protect Artsakh in 2020 from Azerbaijan’s invasion, it was obvious that Russia had no obligation to defend Artsakh since it was not part of the Republic of Armenia. After all, the military alliance called the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) was between Russia, four other ex-Soviet countries and the Republic of Armenia, not Artsakh. But when Azerbaijan occupied portions of Armenia in 2021 and 2022, many more Armenians began to wake up to the fact that the CSTO would not lift a finger to defend Armenia’s territory.
One would have thought that once Armenians finally realized this fact, they would at long last conclude that no one would defend Armenia. Regrettably, that’s not what happened. They continued their eternal search for saviors. Due to the growing antipathy toward Russia, many Armenians started believing that the West (Europe and the United States) or Iran would now come to their rescue. After a while, when they see that Europe, the U.S. and Iran are not going to save them, they may then fantasize that India and China will defend them. Thus, they will go from country to country looking for a new protector. But Armenians continue to believe that others are obligated to defend them. Every country in the world protects its own national interests, except, it seems, Armenia. If Armenia had a competent leader, he would have taken emergency steps to arm the country to the teeth to defend itself. There are those who say that Armenia would never be able to protect itself from its more powerful enemies, no matter how much it arms itself. While this is true, the solution is not to leave the borders of Armenia unprotected so anyone can walk in. Armenia’s enemies must realize that if they dare to cross its borders, they would pay a heavy price. They should know that Armenia is not a public park that they can freely go in as they please.
Turning to the Brussels meeting of last Friday, naturally joining the European Union or NATO never came up. Armenia did receive pledges for a few hundred million dollars over the next four years and a smaller amount from the United States in economic aid. Naturally, this is a good thing. Who can argue against receiving a grant, assuming that the money will be wisely spent and not go to the pockets of pro-government contractors?
Money was allocated to Armenia for economic development and various other infrastructures, such as energy. That is also good. We then heard a lot of propaganda about Armenia being a democratic state. This was simply lip service to keep Prime Minister Pashinyan happy. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken kept harping on about promoting democracy in Armenia even though the U.S. government pays no attention to such meaningless principles, except when it suits its own political and military interests. Otherwise, the United States would have imposed sanctions on Azerbaijan and Turkey long ago due to their multiple violations of the democratic rights of their own population as well as those of Artsakh Armenians.
Armenia does not need political propaganda from the West. Given the continuous attacks by Azerbaijan on Armenia, even while the Brussels conference was taking place, what Armenia needs the most right now are weapons to defend itself from its deadly enemies, Azerbaijan and Turkey. If and when we lose our homeland, it would be meaningless to have improved structures or democratic rule. With neither the East nor the West providing a security blanket for Armenia, President Ilham Aliyev is reassured that he can do as he pleases with Armenia with no one lifting a finger to protect it, except for handing a fistful of dollars and a lot of useless praise.
Author information
Harut Sassounian
California Courier Editor
Harut Sassounian is the publisher of The California Courier, a weekly newspaper based in Glendale, Calif. He is the president of the Armenia Artsakh Fund, a non-profit organization that has donated to Armenia and Artsakh one billion dollars of humanitarian aid, mostly medicines, since 1989 (including its predecessor, the United Armenian Fund). He has been decorated by the presidents of Armenia and Artsakh and the heads of the Armenian Apostolic and Catholic churches. He is also the recipient of the Ellis Island Medal of Honor.
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Procrastination is the act of putting off something until a future time. It is deferring, postponing or delaying action needlessly. It is one of the terrible vices of human beings because of which many vows, promises and resolutions are never fulfilled. Because of this vice, procrastinators often pay a high price.
Procrastination is a great robber; it robs people of the following important things:
Firstly, procrastination robs people of the opportunity of making decisions at important junctures in their lives. Sometimes an opportunity is wasted, not because we don’t know what to do, not because we fail to do it, but because we don’t do it soon enough.
We can weigh our options for only so long. There comes a time when we have to make a decision, because failure to decide might be the worst decision of all.
How much time do we waste on indecision? Of course, I don’t mean time spent on considering, deliberating or fact-finding. That’s all good, valuable time. After we have considered, deliberated and looked at the facts, do we know how much time we waste playing the old on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand game?
For Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the question “to be or not to be” was a life-or-death issue. For us, it may be less serious, but nonetheless an important one. To move or not to move, to change jobs or not change jobs, to marry or not marry, to buy or not buy.
Making a decision can be much more stressful than implementing it. But procrastination can rob people of the opportunity of making that important decision.
Secondly, procrastination robs people of the opportunity to be successful. Procrastinators hardly succeed in their endeavors, because they always postpone and delay their actions. It seems that in all realms of human endeavor, procrastination comes out a winner every time.
Procrastination can outtalk any student when it comes to homework. It can outthink any executive when it comes to correspondence. It can outwork any homemaker when it comes to doing her home duties. It can outsmart any salesperson when it comes to selling.
Any businessman or salesman will tell us that the art of succeeding is knowing what to do, when to do it, and doing it in a timely way.
Dale Carnegie once said, “One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon, instead of enjoying those roses that are blooming outside our windows today.”
Some people think and talk about tomorrow; meanwhile, they forget to live today. Someone has said, “Remember, yesterday is a canceled check, and tomorrow is a promissory note. The only cash you have is today. Use it wisely for tomorrow may never come.”
Tomorrow can be a detriment, a dangerous thing, because of its ability to rob dreamers of their dreams. Think of the young man who fell in love. He was pretty sure that the young woman felt the same way. But he just couldn’t find the courage to ask her out. He deferred. He put it off. Instead of approaching her, he decided to mail her a love letter every day for one year. Then he would ask her for a date.
He followed the plan faithfully. Every day for one year, he sent her a letter. Finally, he worked up the courage to call her. And that’s when he discovered that she had married the letter carrier.
Thirdly, procrastination robs people of the defining spiritual moments of life. Just as there are defining moments in people’s lives, there are also religious, existential moments in their lives. Procrastination within the spiritual realm is fatal. Today’s necessities cannot await tomorrow’s deliberation. The Apostle writes, “Now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor. 6:2).
There are many people who are victims of procrastination – people who postpone opportunities to make a momentous choice at a decisive juncture in their lives and a life-changing decision to make peace with God.
Author information
Rev. Dr. Vahan Tootikian
Rev. Dr. Vahan H. Tootikian is the Executive Director of the Armenian Evangelical World Council.
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NPR News: 04-09-2024 10PM EDT
NPR News: 04-09-2024 10PM EDT
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