By Susanna Petrosyan, Yerevan. Exclusively for Vestnik Kavkaza
The presidents of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan signed the Treaty of the Eurasian Economic Union (EaEU) at the end of a session of the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council in Astana on May 29. President Serzh Sargsyan (Armenia) asked members of the EaEU to set terms for Armenia to join the organization before June 15.
Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev said that Armenia will have joined the EaEU by July 1 on condition of resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Nazarbayev noted that the leaders of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan had received a letter from the Azerbaijani president the previous day. The letter emphasized that the WTO norms Armenia had adopted were in force only within the borders recognized by the UN: You have joined the World Trade Organization the same way, there is a precedent,” the Kazakh president told his Armenian counterpart. Thus, Armenia was offered to join the EaEU without Nagorno-Karabakh. The Kazakh leader’s statement was doubtlessly made in accordance with the opinions of the presidents of Russia and Belarus. Armenia has not reacted to the statement in any way.
Back in December 2013, Nazarbayev approved the road map for membership in the Customs Union (CU) for Armenia, though he warned that Kazakhstan will sign the road map with a special view because the borders of the Customs Union had not been fixed due to the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute.
It is noteworthy that functionaries have been making optimistic declarations for six months that Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh were a common economic space and the presence of customs offices on the border of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh was out of question. “Nagorno-Karabakh and we will be a single territory. No other formulation can be given in this issue,” Prime Minister Ovik Abramyan has recently said.
On May 31, at a meeting with representatives of youth organizations of the Republican Party, the president declared contrary views. In his words, there were no obstacles for membership of Armenia in the EaEU. “What Nazarbayev said was unpleasant, but it would not harm us. Initially, it was wrong to talk about the borders. What borders are we talking about? The Karabakh dispute is not an issue of the EaEU. Who said we were joining the EaEU together with Nagorno-Karabakh? It has never happened and will never happen because Nagorno-Karabakh is not part of Armenia, according to our law.”
This provokes two questions: why did the Armenian leader, who is so confident that the EaEU cannot set borders, not address the statement to his Kazakh counterpart, and why has Sargsyan suddenly changed his attitude after assuring the public that Armenia would join the EaEU without Nagorno-Karabakh?
The answer to the questions can be found in a statement by Vagram Bagdasaryan, the head of the parliamentary faction of the Republican Party. He said that Serzh Sargsyan’s actions were harmonized with superstates. In this context, harmonization is most likely pressure. The controversial steps of the Armenian president show that he is trying to hold on to power by supporting Russia, a state interested in seeing Armenia in the EaEU.
On the other hand, apart from the declarations of the president and his Republican Party, Armenia has a public and a parliament, where the government controls about 55-56 out of the 131 members. A bigger problem is the president’s backers, many of whom were on the front lines of the Nagorno-Karabakh war. Notably, Armenia has not joined the CU or the EaEU, despite all the declarations of striving to sign the membership treaties.
