The document lays out 262 steps that must be taken for accession.
On Jan. 23, the Armenian government approved a timetable of measures to be implemented as part of Armenia’s process of accession to the trade bloc.
According to the Minister of the Economy Vahram Avanesyan, 150 of the 262 measures must be carried out before Armenia formally joins the bloc.
Wow, announce and join in less than a year’s time? This must be some prestigious club! Any word yet on which country will first in line to lick the dirt off of Putin’s shoes?
Well, I can tell you what will happen to our country in the coming years. We’ll become more authoritarian and less free in a very short period of time. While our neighbors advance, we will continue to remain stagnant and if anything, we’ll get worse. We’ll bare more resemblance to our Soviet past than a country that could have harvested its smarts and created a better place to live. Prices for food are going to go up in accordance to these import agreements, so people will be able to afford less and less. Meanwhile the judiciary, parliament and executive will become more and more corrupt, knowing all too well that Russia will ensure HHK’s authority over the country no matter what via rigged elections (like in Belarus, in Russia, and in our country). Freedoms will gradually be taken away, and any calls for change will be met with our inability to alienate Russia for the “promise” of Russia protecting us from a war, something that eventually won’t even come to pass.
More and more people will continue to leave the country, probably more so under the CU than now, and Armenia will rely even more on remittances than it does now. We’ll have a median age population that goes abroad to work, beautifying and enriching Russia’s peripheries all the while producing no revenue or anything else of value in Armenia.
Get the facts straight: there is no future under Putin’s Russia, not for Russians, not for Armenians, not for Ukrainians, not for anyone. This Customs Union is a bunch of garbage, and was designed to give authoritarian rules like Lukashenko, Putin, and Nazarbayev a safety net.
Yet our beloved Russophile brethren will still line up and sing the same songs of praise to the country that has already dug our own grave for us.
We’re lucky that we have a neighbor to our north that has gone in a completely opposite direction from us. In about 30 years from now, we’ll see which of the two will be the success story: the country that chose to tackle its own corruption from within, invest heavily in tourism, infrastructure development, and private sector jobs, or Armenia, who sold its future for 3 generations in an exchange for cheap gas, the false promise of “protection” in the case of a war, and absolute control by a selfish and corrupt government. We’ll be lucky if there even is an Armenia left in 30 years to make this comparison…