Amid a growing rift with former ally Russia, Armenia has passed a bill calling for the country to submit an application to begin EU membership talks with Brussels.
The Armenian government on Thursday approved a bill drafted in response to a petition that called for the country to submit an application to join the EU bloc.
“Adopting the law doesn’t literally mean Armenia is joining the EU because that cannot be done through a law or government decision — the decision on that can only be made through a referendum,” Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said after the decision.
Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan said on Wednesday that the country could sign a “comprehensive” new partnership agenda with Brussels “in the coming months”, a step that could also include visa liberalisation for its citizens.
The European Commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move comes as Armenia has increasingly deepened its ties with the West in recent years while reducing its traditionally close relations with Russia, including by freezing its membership of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), a Russian-led military alliance, last year.
The landlocked, mountainous country of 2.7 million people has been in conflict with its neighbour Azerbaijan, a major gas supplier to the EU, since the late 1980s.
Yerevan has accused Moscow of failing to defend it against long-time rival Azerbaijan, which launched a military campaign in 2023 to regain control of the country’s breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
The separatist enclave had been run by its ethnic Armenian majority with the backing of Yerevan for more than three decades.
Earlier this week, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev said Armenia posed a “fascist” threat that had to be destroyed.
In response to Pashinyan’s announcement, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Armenia could not join the EU while remaining a member of the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, a trade bloc of former post-Soviet states.
[Edited by Daniel Eck]
