A top Ukrainian club expects its new Armenian signing to help achieve better results domestically as well as in the UEFA Champions League commencing later this month.

Shakhtar Donetsk have officially announced this week that they have completed the transfer of young midfielder Henrikh Mkhitaryan from the city’s rival club Metallurh, at a cost of 6 million euros (about $7.5 million).

An Armenia side with a larger pool of players to choose from and a major Diaspora recruit are set to start their Euro 2012 qualifying campaign with a fixture against the Republic of Ireland on Friday.

The match in Yerevan will be followed by an away game against Macedonia on September 7.

Team Armenia have returned with four medals, including one silver, from the first-ever Youth Olympic Games that ended in Singapore last week.

The 2010 Summer Games held August 14-26 had brought together around 3,500 athletes, aged 14-18, from 205 countries.

In a rare display of a true athletic spirit, an Armenian sport official has offered his and his federation’s condolences on the death of a young sportsman from Azerbaijan.

In a telegram addressed to his Azerbaijani counterpart Ceyhun Mamedov, President of the Armenian Sambo Federation Levon Hayrapetyan said the federation of the sport in Armenia regretted the neighboring republic’s loss of a talented sambo fighter, who drowned in a lake over the weekend.

Armenia’s last hopeful in European club tournaments this year has failed to eliminate the one-goal difference to progress to the next qualifying round of the UEFA Europa League where their rival would have been renowned English side Liverpool.

Despite the great enthusiasm displayed by the FC Mika players in front of the home crowd on Thursday, the Yerevan team failed to convert any of their numerous goal-scoring chances, drawing 0-0 against Macedonia’s FK Rabotnicki. The first leg of the tie played in Skopje last week brought a 1-0 victory to the Macedonians.

Armenia has again insisted that new proposals were made during the latest round of talks with Azerbaijan on the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute last month.

Officials in Azerbaijan have denied that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in June presented his Armenian and Azerbaijani counterparts with new proposals to resolve the protracted conflict.

European club soccer is unlikely to stay longer in Armenia than this summer as three out of four Armenian teams featured in this year’s European Cup tournaments have already capitulated to their rivals.

Titleholder Pyunik who have dominated Armenia’s domestic league in the past decade, have been defeated by FK Partizan (Belgrade) in the UEFA Champions League second qualifying round.

Armenia and Azerbaijan appear to have again failed to overcome their differences and make any progress in negotiations over the protracted Nagorno-Karabakh dispute as their foreign ministers held fresh talks responding to a call by the leaders of the mediating countries.

The July 16-17 meetings between Armenia’s Edward Nalbandyan and Azerbaijan’s Elmar Mammadyarov, held in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on the margins of an OSCE ministerial meeting, had been urged by the presidents of the United States, Russia and France, who made a reference to that effect in their joint statement issued from the G8 summit late last month.

Armenia’s FC Mika will have everything to play for when they host a Macedonian team in the second leg of a UEFA Europa League second qualifying round tie in Yerevan on Thursday. In what seemed to be more of a blessing than a curse for any Armenian team at this stage, the tournament’s draw late last week decided that the winner of the Mika v Rabotnicki tie got an underperforming, but, nonetheless, renowned English Premiership club Liverpool as their next opponent in the third and final qualifying round.

FC Mika conceded a late goal playing against a 10-man competitor in Skopje Thursday night to suffer a 0-1 defeat in the first leg of a UEFA Europa League second qualifying round tie against Macedonia’s Rabotnicki.

The home team lost a player red-carded by the match official seven minutes before half-time. In a game of equal opportunities, Rabotnicki managed to score in the 87th minute to take a slim advantage to the match in Yerevan due on July 22.