CIS

Home page

CIS

Russian and Armenian Presidents meet

19 December 2012 21:41 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. The absence of a common border with Russia is not an “insurmountable obstacle” to Armenia’s accession to a Russian-led customs union, a senior official in Moscow said ahead of fresh talks between Presidents Vladimir Putin and Serzh Sarkisian due late on Wednesday, APA reports quoting Armenian Mass Media.

Putin and Sarkisian were scheduled to meet in the Kremlin after attending a summit of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a military alliance of Russia and five other ex-Soviet states.

All of those states except Armenia are also members of a Russian-dominated economic grouping, the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEc). Their presidents met separately in Moscow immediately after the CSTO summit.

That meeting in turn was followed by trilateral talks between Putin and Presidents Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan and Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus. Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus make up the more tightly-knit Customs Union, which Putin hopes will eventually develop into a larger Eurasian Union of former Soviet republics.

Armenia appears to be facing growing pressure from Moscow to join the Customs Union. It has avoided committing itself until now, citing the lack of common borders with any of the three member states.