Hraparak daily of the Republic of Armenia (RA) writes as follows, in particular: RA Deputy Foreign Minister Mnatsakan Safaryan yesterday betrayed the authorities' fears of Russia.

Answering the question of how Yerevan imagines the EAEU [i.e. the Eurasian Economic Union] rules and transit regulations in the event of the implementation of TRIPP [i.e. Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity project], Safaryan replied: "At the moment, the Republic of Armenia is a member of the EAEU, and the EAEU transit rules operate on our territory."

That is, will TRIPP be with the EAEU regulations? "Yes," he said. It turns out that the project bearing the name of US President Trump has been included in [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's EAEU programs, something for which the Russian side was fighting for about a year, warning the RA authorities that TRIPP cannot work, since the transit rules in Armenia must comply with the EAEU rules, whereas our authorities were stubbornly ignoring these warnings.

Yesterday, this statement became the subject of heated discussions in the political backstage. Some believe that the [current] RF [i.e. the Russian Federation] sanctions [on Armenia] have impoverished our authorities so much that the MFA official did not want to further aggravate Armenian-Russian relations, but created a risk of an Armenian-American conflict.

That the actions of the Russian side are worrying the RA authorities became clear from another fact: the official Kremlin reported that at the initiative of the Armenian side, a [Armenian PM Nikol] Pashinyan-[Russian PM Mikhail] Mishustin telephone conversation took place, they discussed "agenda issues of Armenia-RF cooperation, which relate to trade-economic, scientific-technological, and cultural-humanitarian spheres."

But [the fact] that the conversation was held at the initiative of the Armenian side was left out of the RA government's statement.