On 20 October the governments of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan sent the Eurasian Economic Commission a report on the consequences of suspending the EAEU treaty for Armenia, for transmission to the five heads of state, as CAW reported. The next day Ararat Mirzoyan gave Yerevan’s first public response, at the parliamentary Committee on Foreign Relations, where he presented the bill ratifying the framework agreement with the United States on the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP), and at a briefing with journalists afterwards.
The legal answer came first. “The document you referred to was published yesterday. It is quite a lengthy document. We are studying and analysing it, and will determine the Republic of Armenia’s course of action and position accordingly,” he said, according to Armenpress’s 17:10 report. Armenia, he added, knows of no mechanism that allows one member state to be expelled by a decision of the others, including through a suspension of its membership, and will respond once it has examined the report.
The report’s authors had anticipated the point. As CAW reported on 21 October, the document itself says the treaty contains no suspension procedure and grounds the four governments’ right to a joint decision in the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Which article of the convention it invokes, none of the published accounts says. Mirzoyan named neither the convention nor any article of the treaty.
He then ranked the interests. “Of course, our citizens’ well-being, trade, economic interests and our traditional ties with the Russian Federation and the other EAEU members are important to us. But there is something that takes precedence and is more important than anything else: the Republic of Armenia’s sovereignty and independence. Our position will therefore be closely determined by this consideration,” he said.
The report prices the alternative. In the suspension scenario it describes, the price of Russian gas for Armenia rises from $177.5 to $300 per 1,000 cubic metres, an increase of about 69%, and Armenia’s trade with the other members falls by 55.6%, from $7.99 billion to $3.55 billion, by the figures CAW reported on 21 October. Asked about the consequences of a price rise, Mirzoyan conceded the loss and questioned the manner. “Losses, certainly. If the Russian side suddenly decides to unilaterally raise the price of gas, I don’t know to what extent that would be in the spirit of partnership and reflect our relations with Russia.”
He proposed a wider audit. “There are many factors in Armenia-Russia economic and strategic relations,” he said, and suggested that “perhaps we should discuss the whole picture across the entire spectrum, think it over, make decisions, and understand”. There was, he said, a preliminary understanding that the two sides should sit down and take stock of their relations and the components of their cooperation. Who agreed to that, and when, the briefing did not say.
But there is something that takes precedence and is more important than anything else: the Republic of Armenia’s sovereignty and independence.
The TRIPP question came at the committee. Strong Armenia’s Syuzanna Avetisyan asked whether the agreement with the United States complies with EAEU regulations and what happens if the union changes its transit rules. “As long as we are members of the EAEU, those regulations apply to us. But it seems that all EAEU members have trade and economic relations with their neighbors,” Mirzoyan replied, in the agency’s rendering. “We want to go through Azerbaijan to Central Asia and China and bring cargo from there. We want to connect with Iran through Nakhchivan. Do we need this or not? If the answer to that question is yes, that’s it, the story ends here.”
The committee approved the bill with four votes in favour and one against, Armenpress reported at 15:56, and sent it to the plenary session opening on 27 October. After the vote Mirzoyan told reporters that an agreement between Armenia and the United States “could not contain anything that would impose an obligation on Azerbaijan when Azerbaijan is not signing it”, that decisions on border and customs matters under TRIPP stay with Armenia’s own services, and that the procedures for Armenian citizens crossing Azerbaijani territory “probably still” need clarifying.
The agency’s report does not name the dissenting committee member, and the four governments’ report carries no date for the decision it contemplates: the presidents’ joint statement of 29 May that commissioned it set a December horizon, as CAW reported. Mirzoyan committed Yerevan to nothing beyond studying the document. What he did fix is the order of its interests, with sovereignty first, and the point on which it will contest the four: the treaty’s silence on suspension.
The report’s five addressees include Nikol Pashinyan. By the morning of 22 October the only answer from Yerevan was his foreign minister’s, and it was an answer about procedure: Armenia is studying a document whose authors concede that the treaty has no suspension clause and reach outside it, to the Vienna Convention, for one.