Underground clinic’s fate hangs in the balance after government withdrew state funding

For most people, spending hours deep underground in darkness would seem an odd prescription for better health.

Yet every morning, a handful of Armenians descend 250 metres beneath the earth into an active salt mine where they spend six hours in cavernous chambers carved from rock salt, hoping the air below ground will help them breathe more easily.

Gagik Tsarukyan hopes project will resonate with global movement that blends religious faith, nationalism and cultural conservatism

Behind the walls of a sprawling estate on the outskirts of Yerevan, six tigers prowl behind a fence, three lions pace their enclosures, and alligators bask in the afternoon heat.

Further into the compound, more animals appear. Beneath a gilded, hand-painted ceiling, a dining hall houses a taxidermy menagerie: white tigers reared on their hind legs, a stuffed eagle perched atop a table, bear and wolf pelts spread across the floor. All of these, the owner proudly said, had been shot by him.

With roots in Armenia, Syria and Saudi Arabia, the singer-songwriter now lives in the US. But despite her Carole King-style sound, her homelands are never far from her mind

The title song to Azniv Korkejian’s fourth album as Bedouine, Neon Summer Skin, recreates a perfect day from childhood. “Being taken to the pool, where my only worry is being dragged away when the sun’s setting,” she says, calling from Los Angeles. “Later on, mom and dad wash me in the tub and put me to bed.” Steeped in dreamy 70s soft pop, the track isn’t merely an exercise in nostalgia. “I wanted to paint a picture of what it’s like to feel safe,” she says. “So much of the record is about not having the luxury to not consider your own safety. I think about this a lot when it comes to the children in Palestine and Lebanon, who are not afforded that right.”

The conflicts that have ravaged the Middle East are context for Neon Summer Skin, but the album’s themes of displacement, identity and insecurity – wrapped in the deceptively soft sound of 1970s-style MOR pop – are also personal. Korkejian’s family are Armenian, but she and her parents were born in Syria, while her brothers were born in Saudi Arabia, where the Korkejians lived, “on a US compound that was like a gated community”, until 1995. That year, unnerved by the proximity of the recent Gulf war, the family successfully applied for the green card lottery and relocated to the US. “And thank God, because we would eventually have had to return to Syria,” Korkejian says. “I don’t know what would have happened to us then.”

Result strengthens PM Nikol Pashinyan’s drive for deeper integration with Europe despite warnings from Moscow

Armenia’s ruling pro-Europe party has won parliamentary elections, confirming the country’s pivot towards Europe and away from its traditional ally, Russia.

Final results in the small South Caucasus country showed the prime minister Nikol Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party securing a slim majority, while the Strong Armenia alliance, led by the Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan, won 25% of the seats in parliament.

PM secured re-election despite devastating military defeat to Azerbaijan and political and economic pressure from Moscow

For most candidates, campaigning on the loss of an ancestral homeland and advocating reconciliation with a longtime enemy would amount to political suicide. Not in Armenia.

On Sunday, the prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, secured re-election in the Caucasus nation of 3 million people, despite having led Armenia through a devastating military defeat to Azerbaijan just three years ago.

Voters to choose between pro-Russian opposition and incumbent Nikol Pashinyan, who is more closely aligned with the west

Armenians are awaiting the results of an election that could cement the country’s shift towards Europe and away from its traditional alliance with Russia.

Prime minister Nikol Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party entered the vote on Sunday as the favourite, ahead of three opposition candidates who advocate for closer ties with Moscow. Pashinyan’s main challenger, Samvel Karapetyan, a Russian-Armenian billionaire who built much of his fortune in Russia, was forced to campaign from house arrest at his mansion outside Yerevan.

Relationship between Vladimir Putin and traditional ally has slowly unravelled under current PM Nikol Pashinyan

The bottling line at the Abovyan cognac factory in Armenia is running at full tilt.

Women in white coats and hairnets work the conveyor with practised speed – labelling, stacking, loading pallets – racing to fill a truck.

As former Soviet Republic goes to the polls, it finds itself in a strategic tug of war between Russia, the US, Turkey, Europe and Azerbaijan

To describe Yerevan, a charming city of liberal values encased in imposing Soviet architecture, as the centre of the world is a stretch, but Armenia’s claim that it can become the strategic crossroads of the landmass of Eurasia is becoming less and less fanciful. As the former Soviet Republic goes to the polls on 7 June for national elections, it finds itself in a five-way tug of war between Russia, the US, Turkey, Europe and Azerbaijan.

The interest has in part been sparked by the possibility of an end to Armenia’s conflict with its neighbour Azerbaijan – and the chance this represents for Armenia to end its physical isolation and become part of the middle corridor, a vital trade route linking western China and Europe, bypassing both Russia’s northern corridor and the Suez canal.

Meeting of European Political Community comes amid renewed doubts about the US commitment to Nato

Europe will not submit to a more “brutal world”, and can instead be the base from which a new international order can be rebuilt, Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, has said.

Carney was speaking as the first non-European leader to attend a meeting of the European Political Community, which opened on Monday amid high tensions in the strait of Hormuz and renewed doubts about the US commitment to Nato.

Bloc’s leaders to hold first summit with Armenia on Tuesday at it ramps up efforts to combat Kremlin’s influence

The EU is sending a team of experts specialised in combating Russian propaganda and interference to Armenia, as it increases its support to the former Soviet republic in a tense political period.

In a highly symbolic sequence of events, EU leaders will hold their first summit with Armenia on Tuesday, after a pan-European gathering of about 45 leaders at the European Political Community summit in Yerevan.

Attendance at European Political Community meeting in Yerevan seen as part of effort to build ties after US rupture

Canada is to become the first non-European country to attend a meeting of the European Political Community when the prime minister, Mark Carney, joins Monday’s summit of the 48-plus nation grouping in Yerevan, Armenia.

Carney has said he is determined to build a new network of trade and diplomatic alliances after the loss of US markets under Donald Trump. His presence will also represent a show of western support for Armenia in its efforts to distance itself from Russia at a time when Washington’s approach to Moscow’s opponents, such as Ukraine, is at best ambiguous. Canadian diplomats have rejected suggestions Ottawa might seek EU membership.

Rena Effendi attempts to find the species named after her wayward, womanising father – and a connection to the man she never knew – in this moving documentary

Photojournalist Rena Effendi’s father was famous in the world of butterflies; he was a lepidopterist who spent seven years hunting one species. Effendi remarks drily that seven years was longer than Rustam Effendi lasted in any of his four – possibly more – marriages. (When asked for a precise headcount of wives, his old friend answers: “God knows!”) Effendi was 14 when her father died; he had been a mostly absent presence during her childhood, and had another family while being married to her mother. At his funeral, she remembers only women around his coffin. Years later, she discovered from his Wikipedia page that he had a butterfly named after him, the rare and endangered Satyrus effendi.

This gentle, perceptive documentary follows Effendi as she searches for the elusive butterfly, which flies for just two weeks a year high in the Caucasus mountains – and chases her father’s ghost. Her mother is evasive, saying only that she would have forgiven Rustam almost anything. Effendi’s first hurdle on her mission to catch the butterfly is obtaining permission to travel to its habitat, on the border between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Effendi is Azerbaijani; her father died just as the Soviet Union teetered on the brink of collapse, after which tensions exploded between Armenia and Azerbaijan and war broke out. There is now a fragile peace.

Rena Effendi’s film Searching for Satyrus began with a quest for the endangered insect that bears her family name. Before long, she was reckoning with secrets, lies and the mysterious life of her wayward dad

High in the Caucasus mountains, the photojournalist Rena Effendi is searching for the butterfly that bears the name of the father she hardly knew. It is rocky, bleak, beautiful – and impossible. The grass is fried yellow by the increasingly fierce summer sun, the butterfly’s food has been grazed by sheep and, if it exists at all, Satyrus effendi usually flies only as a single insect across a square kilometre of rock, scree and slope.

A butterfly hunt makes an unlikely subject for a prize-winning documentary, but Searching for Satyrus is a gripping quest that reveals a remarkable part of the world little known to western audiences while examining issues from war and nationalism to global heating and extinction. Ultimately, however, Effendi’s search for her father’s butterfly becomes a moving reckoning with the secrets and lies in her family and the life of her wayward father.

US vice-president’s post marks first time Trump administration used the word to describe the massacres

The White House has deleted a social media post in which the vice-president, JD Vance, referred to the Armenian genocide, prompting anger from members of the Armenian diaspora as well as opposition politicians across the US.

The post was made during Vance’s two-day trip to Armenia to mark a visit by Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, to a memorial for the up to 1.5 million Armenians killed by Ottoman troops more than a century ago. The now-deleted post on Vance’s official X account said he was visiting the memorial to honour “the victims of the Armenian genocide”.

Exclusive: Multimillion-pound contract raises concerns about controls designed to prevent firms unwittingly aiding destruction of Ukraine

The government has been urged to re-examine a British company’s contract to export hi-tech machinery to Armenia, after the Guardian uncovered links to the supply chain for Russia’s war machine.

Sanctions experts and the chair of the House of Commons business committee questioned the government’s decision to award an export licence to Cygnet Texkimp.

• ISU review resolves Olympic skating music dispute issue

• Azerbaijan complaint prompts Olympic music listing edit

• Armenia-Azerbaijan tensions resurface again at Olympics

A politically charged dispute between the Olympic delegations of Azerbaijan and Armenia over figure skating music has been resolved after skating and IOC authorities reviewed the matter and the official program listing was amended.

The International Skating Union (ISU) said in a statement to the Guardian on Sunday that it had examined the matter with relevant stakeholders. “The situation has been reviewed with all parties involved,” the ISU said. “The official names of the tracks that will be used are listed on the ISU website.”

The second year of London’s Armenian film festival reflects a country in flux as the legacy of recent conflict with Azerbaijan hangs over attempts to strengthen ties with the west

There is a point during Tamara Stepanyan’s My Armenian Phantoms when the documentary cuts to the final scene of the 1980 Soviet film, A Piece of Sky, in which the orphaned lead character, joyfully rides a horse and cart through the town that had long shunned him and the sex worker he married as social outcasts.

A flock of birds are then framed gliding through the pristine blue sky above. It’s a sequence depicting the desire to overcome the forces that seek to limit and constrain which lay at the heart of the director Henrik Malyan’s new wave critique.