Courier Online, May 25, 2026
Sassounian
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1- If Pashinyan Bans Any Opposition Party,
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan is proceeding with his electoral campaign amid countless violations of Armenia’s laws.
We have been witnessing Pashinyan’s rude, insulting, hysterical, and aggressive reactions whenever a citizen dares to criticize him during his campaign stops. This is not the normal behavior of a sane person, let alone the behavior expected of a Prime Minister.
There have been plenty of videos posted on social media during the past few weeks that show Pashinyan’s abnormal behavior towards those — mostly gutsy women — who courageously tell him to his face about the disastrous results of his policies, which have led to the loss of Artsakh, thousands of soldiers, parts of the Republic of Armenia, and perhaps soon all of Armenia. When citizens confront him to express their disagreement, they are viciously attacked by Pashinyan or pushed and shoved by his brainwashed supporters.
Those who have been following Pashinyan’s irrational behavior and senseless statements can see that he is increasingly exhibiting signs of mental disorder: screaming, threatening to jail, or even kill (“sadgetsnel”) his political opponents.
In recent months, Pashinyan’s subservient National Security Agency has accused his critics of being foreign agents, going as far as disseminating obviously fake documents. Pashinyan claimed that his major opponent in the election, Samvel Karapetyan, is a Russian agent. Karapetyan was arrested and charged with planning a coup d’état simply for saying that he supports the Armenian Apostolic Church. By releasing another fake document, Pashinyan falsely accused Karapetyan’s nephew, Nareg, of not disclosing his Russian citizenship — which would be a violation of electoral laws, since he is a parliamentary candidate. In addition, Pashinyan continues to interfere in Armenia’s judicial system by directing judges, who are supposed to be independent.
In the last two months, dozens of supporters of his political opponents have been arrested and imprisoned under the false accusation of giving bribes to voters. This is a ridiculous charge. Who is so foolish as to give a bribe to potential voters months before the election, hoping that they would vote for their party in the future?
Pashinyan has also imprisoned several high-ranking clergymen under the false pretext of committing various crimes. Furthermore, he regularly posts on Facebook obscene accusations against the Catholicos of All Armenians and meddles in internal Church affairs — a blatant violation of the constitutional provision on the separation of Church and State.
For years, Pashinyan has falsely claimed that his party’s previous two election victories, in 2018 and 2021, were fair and free of fraud. However, his actions tell a different story: he has violated numerous electoral laws, such as using governmental resources for his campaign, threatening his opponents, and employing illegal fundraising methods.
During the 2023 Yerevan City Council election, Pashinyan’s Civil Contract political party raised $1.3 million to ensure the victory of Tigran Avinyan, its candidate for mayor. An independent investigation revealed that some of the campaign funds donated by several individuals used fake names to hide their true identities. Violations included making large donations under others’ names. A woman whose ID card was fraudulently used was outraged and firmly denied making such a donation. In another case, donations were made in the names of eight employees of a prominent businessman — without their knowledge. Despite such blatant violations of fundraising laws, the courts failed to take any legal action against Pashinyan’s party.
Continuing the Civil Contract’s questionable fundraising practices, a new independent investigation by Infocom revealed that at least 23 directors of hospitals and medical centers from various regions of Armenia made almost simultaneous donations to the ruling party in March 2025. These directors of government-owned facilities are beholden to the authorities for their positions. More than $15,000 was transferred to the ruling party within a few days — between March 4 and 11, 2025. During the entire year, directors of 31 medical centers contributed about $22,000 to Pashinyan’s party. Even the Health Minister donated around $2,000 in 2025 to the ruling party. Infocom also revealed that Pashinyan’s party and the “My Step“ Foundation, led by his partner Anna Hakobyan, received contributions totaling $300,000 in the past three years from business owners or officials whose companies were granted government tax exemptions.
After making repeated threats to imprison his political opponents and warning that the opposition parties will not win any parliamentary seats in the upcoming election, Pashinyan may now cross all red lines and ban one or more opposition parties from the June 7 elections to guarantee his Civil Contract party’s victory.
If that happens, all opposition parties must boycott the parliamentary elections in protest. The result will be a parliament consisting exclusively of Pashinyan’s party after June 7 — reminiscent of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR where only the Communist Party was represented. This would confirm that Armenia is not a democratic country, but an autocracy.
So far, the West — out of self-interest and to the detriment of Armenia’s national interests — has ignored major violations of democratic rule. But if only one party remains in parliament, the West could no longer pretend that Armenia is a normal democracy. A concerted diplomatic effort should be launched to push foreign governments to refuse recognition of the illegitimate election results.
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A jury in the Central District of California convicted a California doctor yesterday in a $45 million scheme to defraud Medicare by submitting claims for Botox injections that were never provided and medically unnecessary, and for obstructing the investigation by manipulating and altering medical records in an attempt to mislead criminal investigators. The investigation was initiated as a result of a referral from the Health Care Fraud Section’s Data Analytics Team, after its analysis showed that the defendant was paid more by Medicare for Botox injections than any other doctor in the United States.
“Violetta Mailyan falsely diagnosed patients, fraudulently billed for Botox injections while she was actually on lavish vacations, and tried to trick federal agents with fake records,” said Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald of the Justice Department’s National Fraud Enforcement Division. “The Fraud Division’s data-driven approach will shine a light on fraud schemes across the country, ensuring that no doctor can engage in these types of brazen schemes to rob Medicare.”
“Let this conviction serve as a warning: anyone who leverages their medical authority to defraud Medicare will be caught and held accountable,” said Acting Deputy Inspector General for Investigations Scott J. Lampert of the Health and Human Servics Office of Inspector General (HHS‑OIG). “This defendant’s actions were a blatant betrayal of patients and the public trust. HHS‑OIG will stay relentless in protecting federal health care programs from those who seek to exploit them.”
“Physicians who defraud and manipulate federally funded health care programs to line their own pockets do so at the expense of American taxpayers and those who are in legitimate need of medical procedures,” said Assistant Director in Charge Patrick Grandy of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office. “The FBI is gratified that the jury convicted Dr. Mailyan based on the evidence, which uncovered the largest Botox fraud scheme in the United States, to include brazenly billing for someone who was incarcerated. Furthermore, the FBI is committed to pursuing physicians and others in the healthcare system who fleece Medicare and, in doing so, drive up premiums and co-payments for law-abiding citizens.”
According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, Violetta Mailyan, 45, of Glendale, owned and operated Healthy Way Medical Center, a clinic that purported to provide beauty and cosmetic services. Although Medicare reimburses medical providers for Botox injections when necessary to treat documented cases of chronic migraines, Mailyan billed and received payments for thousands of injections that were never provided or were provided only for cosmetic purposes or for patients whose primary care physicians had not referred them for treatment of chronic migraines. For example, the evidence at trial showed that Mailyan billed for providing Botox injections when she was actually on vacation in Cabo, Mexico; Maui, Hawaii; Las Vegas; Pennsylvania; and New York; billed for purportedly injecting a Medicare beneficiary who was actually incarcerated in federal prison at the time; and billed for thousands of injections, representing over $19 million, purportedly provided on days when her clinic was closed. The evidence also showed that Mailyan backdated some claims to bill for injections purportedly provided before the patients even contacted Mailyan’s clinic to request an appointment, and fabricated patient medical records, including patient consent forms, to make it appear as if patients suffered from chronic migraines and had received treatment for those migraines in her office.
In addition to the fraudulent billing, the evidence at trial showed that Mailyan actively sought to cover up her crimes when investigators were closing in. After receiving a grand jury subpoena seeking medical records, Mailyan altered patient records to make it appear as if she had provided Botox injections for chronic migraines when in fact those services had not been provided, and provided the altered documents to federal agents.
The evidence at trial showed that Mailyan used Medicare funds she obtained through the scheme to pay for her lavish vacations in Mexico, Hawaii, and elsewhere, and to purchase luxury collectible goods such as a $12,000 17th century crossbow and a $3,000 painting.
This prosecution illustrates the success of the Department’s efforts to use advanced data analytics to detect health care fraud schemes and bring the perpetrators to justice. The Health Care Fraud Section’s Data Analytics Team identified Mailyan as an extreme outlier among doctors receiving Medicare payments for Botox, having at the time been paid more than $24 million over the previous four years — six times the next highest group of providers, all of whom were neurologists. As the investigation and evidence presented at trial showed, Mailyan’s outlier status owed entirely to her pervasive and long-running fraud scheme.
Following the conviction, the jury also found that a Tesla Model X, a Tesla Cybertruck, $251,124 in funds contained in multiple bank accounts, brokerage accounts valued at $7,312,037 at the time of seizure, and four properties in Surfside and Glendale, California with combined estimated equity of $7,343,636, were proceeds of the fraud subject to forfeiture. The Cybertruck seized from Mailyan is shown below:
Mailyan was convicted of nine counts of wire fraud and three counts of obstruction of a criminal investigation of a health care offense. She is scheduled to be sentenced on September 10, 2026. She faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for each count of wire fraud and 5 years in prison for each count of obstruction. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.
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A. Hakobyan, M. Hakobyan and Y. Hakobyan, G. Ghazaryan and Av. Ghazaryan, citizens of Armenia, won a lawsuit in the European Court of Human Rights against the Republic of Armenia.
The case concerns their complaints about the excessive length of proceedings before the civil and administrative courts, lasting between seven to over 13 years. The applicants claimed that there were no effective remedies at national level to seek compensation for excessive length of proceedings.
The applicants accused the Republic of Armenia of violating Article 6 § 1 (right to a fair trial within a reasonable time) and article 13 (right to an effective remedy) of the European Convention on Human Rights.
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A Greek court sentenced a 27-year-old Azerbaijani man to prison on espionage charges on Tuesday for monitoring a military base on the island of Crete, Reuters reported, citing legal sources.
The man, sentenced to seven years and one month in prison, was arrested in June last year following a surveillance operation by police and Greece’s intelligence service, on suspicion of monitoring the Souda naval base — a strategic facility for Greece, the United States and NATO, according to the report.
The probe showed that the man, who had a temporary residence permit from Poland, had first arrived in Greece in January 2025 and since mid-June had been staying in a hotel room with a view of the naval and air force base in Chania, western Crete.
He was accused of collecting and transmitting state secrets and critical military information to foreign powers, including photographs and videos of military installations, police sources said.
Evidence included 23 videos and nine photographs of a Greek Navy frigate which had arrived in Souda for refuelling.”He did not intend to spy,” his lawyer, Sofia Saripanidou, told Reuters. “He took pictures of a view, where everyone has access.”
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The trip is expected to include meetings, press conferences, and the signing of bilateral documents. It comes amid expanding Armenia-U.S. strategic engagement, including talks around the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process and the U.S.-backed TRIPP regional transit framework.
Rubio’s visit would mark the first trip to Armenia by a sitting U.S. secretary of state since Hillary Clinton traveled to Yerevan in 2010 and again in 2012.
The timing is politically significant. The visit comes less than two weeks before Armenia’s June 7 parliamentary elections and was not publicly announced in advance, underscoring both the sensitivity and the high-level nature of the trip.
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Joulhayan described ancient remains discovered near the Aras River, near Mount Ararat, where researchers reportedly compared ancient genetic samples with modern Armenians and found remarkable continuity stretching back thousands of years. “How could that be?” he asked. “Mongolians attacked. Turks. Persians. Romans. Greeks. Armenian DNA should have changed.”
Kevork Joulhayan walked into the Utah Stories studio carrying both deep pride in his Armenian roots and the weight of a history that still feels personal to many Armenians today. Not history pulled from textbooks or documentaries, but family history passed down through generations by survivors, grandparents, photographs, church communities, and stories that were never allowed to disappear.
He brought old photographs. Armenian brandy. Pomegranate wine from Armenia. Stories about his grandfather. Stories about Aleppo. Stories about survival. Stories about names deliberately passed down so the dead would not disappear completely.
And before almost anything else, he wanted to talk about DNA.
“They cannot explain it,” he said.
Joulhayan described ancient remains discovered near the Aras River, near Mount Ararat, where researchers reportedly compared ancient genetic samples with modern Armenians and found remarkable continuity stretching back thousands of years. The way he spoke about it made it clear he was not trying to present a scientific lecture. To him, it reinforced what many Armenians already believe emotionally about themselves: despite invasions, massacres, forced conversions, deportations, conquest, exile, and genocide, their identity survived.
“How could that be?” he asked. “Mongolians attacked. Turks. Persians. Romans. Greeks. Armenian DNA should have changed.”
The conversation lasted nearly an hour, but everything eventually circled back to survival and the persistence of Armenian identity across generations. Joulhayan was not speaking only about physical survival after the genocide. He was talking about the survival of memory, language, religion, family structures, and the emotional inheritance passed from grandparents to grandchildren long after the original trauma ended.
Sitting across from him, it became obvious that the Armenian Genocide is not something he thinks about as distant history. It feels much closer than that, almost present tense.
The Grandfather Who Refused to Be Forgotten
Throughout the interview, Joulhayan was not simply sharing family stories. He spoke with the urgency of someone who feels responsible for keeping Armenian history alive and making sure the rest of the world understands what happened to his people.
His grandfather escaped the Armenian Genocide in 1915 after fleeing Ain Tab, historically Armenian territory inside the collapsing Ottoman Empire. Like countless Armenian survivors, he eventually reached Aleppo, Syria, where displaced Armenians were rebuilding shattered lives from almost nothing.
There he married another genocide survivor. Together they raised eight children. One of those children became Joulhayan’s father.
Then he emphasized what his grandfather told the family before he died.
“You don’t owe me anything except one thing. Name one of your sons Kevork so I won’t be forgotten.”
Joulhayan became that grandson.
He smiled while telling the story, but the emotion underneath it was unmistakable. The name was not simply tradition but continuity. A way of ensuring that somebody who survived the genocide would continue existing inside future generations long after his death.
“Wherever Kevork ends up,” Joulhayan said, describing his grandfather’s thinking, “he’s going to tell my story.”
And decades later, sitting in Utah across from Richard Markosian, that is exactly what he was doing.
“Something Inside You Starts Bubbling”
“You can change your name. You can change your appearance. You can change your eye color, your hair color,” Joulhayan said. “DNA is not altering.”
For him, the survival of Armenian identity was inseparable from the genocide itself. Armenians had been scattered across Syria, Lebanon, Greece, Iran, and the United States, yet many families continued preserving the same language, churches, traditions, surnames, and tightly connected communities generation after generation.
“They always reconnect,” he said while explaining how Armenian families often sought out marriages within Armenian communities even after exile and displacement. “They always choose to marry one of their own.”
He described Armenians as people who survived repeated invasions and conquest while still holding onto a strong sense of identity. Mongolians. Turks. Persians. Romans. Greeks. Throughout the interview, he kept returning to the same question:
“How could Armenian DNA stay the same?”
Then he paused and connected it to something more emotional than science.
“Something inside you starts bubbling like a volcano,” he said. “You don’t know where it’s coming from. It’s coming from inside.”
For Joulhayan, the genocide did not erase Armenian identity because families continued carrying it forward through memory, religion, language, and family history. Even descendants born thousands of miles from Armenia still grew up hearing the stories.
Markosian’s own family history reflected that same continuity. His great-grandfather escaped after being conscripted into the Turkish army and ordered to fight Armenians. His great-grandmother survived deportation marches after being left for dead before eventually immigrating to Utah.
More than a century later, both men were still talking about the genocide not as distant history, but as something that continued shaping Armenian identity long after survivors themselves were gone.
Aleppo, Lebanon, and Waiting for America
Joulhayan was born in Aleppo in 1966 inside one of the largest Armenian diaspora communities formed after the genocide.
When he was still young, his family moved to Lebanon while applying to immigrate to the United States. The process took 15 years.
He spoke about those years carefully, but there were moments where the exhaustion underneath the story still surfaced. Lebanon descended into civil war during that time, and as an Armenian family living inside another country’s conflict, survival became uncertain again.
“I’m Armenian,” he said while describing those years. “I’m trying to survive.”
He told friends constantly that one day he was going to America. Not because he thought America was perfect, but because he associated it with freedom and stability after generations of instability.
Then the Beirut embassy bombing happened in 1983.
Only a week before his immigration appointment, the American embassy was destroyed in an attack that killed dozens of people, including U.S. Marines.
Joulhayan still seemed stunned remembering it decades later.
“One week before my appointment,” he said, shaking his head.
The immigration process collapsed again.
Eventually the family rerouted through Greece, spent time in Athens completing paperwork, and finally arrived in the United States.
Joulhayan came to America in his early twenties and eventually settled in Utah.
Despite everything he described throughout the interview, the thing he returned to repeatedly was gratitude.
“I love it here,” he said.
He spoke openly about freedom throughout the conversation, but not in an ideological way. He described freedom more personally, as the ability to openly be himself, openly Armenian, openly expressive without fear.
Armenia Was Never Just a Country to Him
He repeatedly returned to the idea that Armenians never fully separated themselves from the land, history, and religion that shaped them. While describing ancient Armenia, Joulhayan traced its borders from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and spoke about a civilization that existed long before modern Turkey.
“There was no Turkey,” he said at one point while discussing ancient Armenian kingdoms. “We’re talking B.C.”
He described Armenia as the first Christian nation, saying Armenians accepted Christianity in 301 A.D. before much of the rest of the world. When the discussion turned to the Council of Nicaea and the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire, Joulhayan spoke with unmistakable pride.
“We already know Jesus,” he said. “We already had the Bible. We already had written a Bible in Armenian. We already knew Jesus before them.”
To him, Armenian Christianity was not simply a religion. It was proof of continuity and endurance.
That same feeling came through when he pulled out a printed copy of the Armenian alphabet and began reciting it from memory.
“Since 301 A.D. we’ve been talking Armenian,” he said.
He explained that Armenian leaders created and preserved the alphabet because they feared losing their identity while living between larger empires and surrounding cultures.
“Freedom is very important for Armenians,” he said. “We would die for freedom.”
Mount Ararat surfaced repeatedly throughout the interview as well, not just as geography, but almost as emotional territory. Joulhayan connected Ararat to Noah’s Ark traditions, ancient Armenia, Armenian wine-making history, and the survival of Armenian civilization itself.
While holding a bottle of Armenian pomegranate wine, he described villages near Ararat where wine has supposedly been made for thousands of years.
“They just found a 5,000-year-old cave winery,” he said. “That village still makes wine.”
Later he pointed toward the Armenian coat of arms and explained the symbolism almost like someone introducing members of his own family. The eagle represented one Armenian royal house. The lion represented another. In the center sat Mount Ararat and Noah’s Ark.
“These little flags,” he said while pointing to the symbols around the crest, “each different kingdom, little minor kingdom was formed during this period.”
For Joulhayan, none of these subjects existed separately. Ancient Armenia, Christianity, language, Noah’s Ark traditions, genocide survival, diaspora communities, family names, and modern Armenian identity all seemed connected inside the same continuous story.
Why Recognition Still Matters
At one point, Markosian mentioned that when he first wrote about Armenian genocide survivors in Utah back in 2011, the United States still had not officially recognized the Armenian Genocide. That changed in 2021 when President Joe Biden formally recognized it as genocide.
“If they don’t tell the Turkish government, ‘You need to acknowledge it, accept it, apologize,’” Joulhayan said, “someone else somewhere is going to commit the same crime again.”
Then he pointed directly to Artsakh, also known as Nagorno-Karabakh.
“Happened in Artsakh,” he said. “One hundred fifty thousand Armenians that lived in Nagorno-Karabakh, they were driven away.”
“They’re homeless in Armenia,” he continued. “Armenia doesn’t have free land, free houses to give away.”
He spoke about Armenian churches being destroyed after Armenians fled.
“Every month Azerbaijani government is destroying one Armenian church,” he said. “They want to erase the Christian minority that was there.”
Later, while talking about the original genocide, Markosian reflected on the homes his great-grandparents once lived in.
“They just moved into their houses after they murdered them?” he asked.
“Yep,” Joulhayan replied.
“They stole the little Armenian kids,” Joulhayan continued. “They erased their identity. They put them in their own orphanage.”
According to Joulhayan, many people in modern Turkey are now discovering Armenian ancestry through DNA testing.
“They think they’re Turkish,” he said. “Then they find out, ‘Oh, I’m part Armenian.’ They’re shocked.”
The Photographs on the Table
Late in the interview, Joulhayan spread old family photographs across the table.
One showed his grandfather.
Another showed enormous family gatherings in Aleppo with children and grandchildren packed tightly together.
In one faded photograph, he pointed toward a tiny infant.
“That little baby,” he said quietly, “that’s me.”
The photographs clearly mattered to him deeply, not as nostalgic keepsakes but as evidence. Evidence that his grandfather survived. Evidence that the family continued. Evidence that the genocide failed to erase them completely.
By the end of the interview, the DNA discussion that opened the conversation almost felt secondary.
The deeper mystery was not really genetic.
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