Deputy foreign minister Mikhail Galuzin gave TASS an interview published on Tuesday morning. On the referendum the union has been demanding of Yerevan he attached a month: if the call has not been heeded by December, the leaders will take that fact into account when they determine their further joint steps. The anchor he cited, a statement of 29 May by the presidents of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, asked for a referendum in the shortest possible time and set no deadline at all. December is new.
The December session of the Eurasian Economic Council will also hear a report on what follows from suspending the application of the EAEU treaty to Armenia. That is the second date.
The third is 11 November. Restrictive measures against a member inside the CSTO fall to the Collective Security Council, Galuzin said, and the question may be taken up at the summit that day. Armenia's non-participation, he added, does not suspend its financial obligations to the organisation.
Five minutes before that story ran, Interfax published a number from the other side. Vazgen Poghosyan, who runs monetary policy at the Central Bank of Armenia, said the branches of the Armenian economy caught by the Russian measures amount to roughly 1 to 1.5 percent of GDP. He named fishing, some segments of the food industry and individual agricultural branches, said some of them will suffer and possibly suffer badly, and said much of the output can be redirected to the domestic market.
Set the two against each other. The bans escalated over 10 weeks, from flowers on 22 May through tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers, stone fruit, grapes and seed crops, to dairy on 27 July. They reach sectors that Armenia's own central bank sizes at 1.5 percent of the economy at the outside, with a domestic market available to take part of the output. A government can carry that.
The membership file is a different order of exposure. Tariff-free access to the union, the accession treaty of 2014 and the seat in the CSTO are worth multiples of the produce trade, and Moscow spent Tuesday morning attaching dates to all three.
There is a reason to read the calendar as pressure rather than as policy. December is 4 months out. The Eurasian Economic Commission has published nothing. Rosselkhoznadzor, the agency that actually imposed the bans, has issued nothing on Armenia since 24 July. A deadline that far away is cheap to set and cheap to move.
Yerevan reads a ballot as consent. Moscow answers that consent has a form, and that the form has until December.
Galuzin also went at the argument Yerevan has been making since June. Armenian officials called the constitutional referendum requirement a meaningless political declaration last year, he said, and then argued that the June parliamentary election result was itself a mandate for the European path. Pashinyan's government resigned on 2 August, the step that opens the way to a cabinet formed on that result.
So the sequence is legible. Yerevan reads a ballot as consent. Moscow answers that consent has a form, and that the form has until December.
Neither side published the thing that would settle it: any indication that the restrictions come off if the referendum is called.