Tomorrow Riga will host a two-day Eastern Partnership summit. The main issue of its agenda will be bilateral relations between the EU and Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine. In addition, the participants in the summit will discuss the crisis in Ukraine, the Prime Minister of Latvia Laimdota Straujuma said.
The head of the Institute of Management Strategy, Petre Mamradze, in an interview with Vestnik Kavkaza said that the main thing Georgian politicians expect from the summit is the possible introduction of a visa-free regime with the EU, however, there is another question – how profitable is the interaction with the European Union for the country?
"Because of the scarcity of news, there is the question of whether Georgia will obtain a visa-free arrangement or not. Meanwhile, some leaders of the European Union said that it will not. And the fact that Steinmeier spoke about some pleasant surprise will only be a statement that the EU will enter individual interaction with the members of the Partnership," he said.
At the same time, according to Mamradze, people in Georgia don't even think about whether the country should seek entry to the EU, but in fact the answer to this question is not so obvious. "And those experts who previously advocated this agreement are now declaring in one voice that it is necessary to ask the EU to suspend it unilaterally," the analyst said. Moreover, many residents of the country are completely indifferent to the issue because of the difficult economic situation.
According to political scientist Professor Fikret Sadykhov of the Western University, we should hardly expect any radical new developments from the Riga summit. There are two reasons for this: firstly, the EU is set toward an individual approach to each of the countries of the Partnership. Secondly, the countries of the Eastern Partnership, including Azerbaijan, have already come to a fundamental position regarding the cooperation with the EU. The same can be said about the rest of the program. "So I do not expect anything extraordinary from the next summit in Riga," Fikret Sadykhov concluded.
The Director of the Armenian branch of the CIS Institute, Alexander Makarov, in his turn, said that Armenia expects to sign a framework document following the summit, as well as certain agreements relating to non-economic areas, such as human rights and a visa regime. The economic sphere of interaction, in fact, does not need further documentation. "Thus, the cooperation in the economic sphere will continue in the framework of some other formal documents. In other areas there is a question about the signing of a document formalizing the nature and substance of the relationship," Alexander Markarov concluded.
