Andrey Smirnov, Vice President of the Eurasian Cooperation Development Foundation, said that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s statement that Armenia could not join the Customs Union in the near future had been made to encourage Armenia to adopt technical regulations and legislative amendments.
Smirnov explained that the Customs Union had a large volume of materials and standards Armenia needed to adopt and Lukashenko’s words were a signal for changes.
The expert believes that Lukashenko was actually encouraging Armenia to cooperate more actively with Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. The Armenian-Belarusian Trade Center was operating in Armenia, a cognac factory opened in Belarus.
Smirnov said that the declarations of September 3 needed to be put into a legal document. Such document may appear at the Minsk summit of heads of the Eurasian Economic Union on October 24.
