YEREVAN. - Armenia has never abandoned its announcements on Eurasian integration, Armenian FM Edward Nalbandian stated the aforementioned Thursday at the joint session of the parliamentary committees.

According to the FM, he had stated about the focus of those talks. The Armenian side was ready to sign an agreement with the EU in areas it had negotiated on, he said.

“I have repeatedly talked about the close and open formats, and am repeating this now. Earlier the issue concerned the impossibility of our joining to the Eurasian Union due to the absence of a common border and a number of other factors. And the working group formed from the representatives of the Armenian Government and states of the then Customs Union concluded that despite these obstacles Armenia may become a Union member. Werepeatedly and publicly stated – and everyone, including the EU, knew - that Armenia wanted to become a member of the Customs Union, but that was impossible. And when conclusion was reached on that this was possible, we launched the talks. We didn’t become a Union member in a day and didn’t sign documents of thousand pages.  We were ready for the talks. In Brussels I also stated that we are ready to sign a document in the areas which don’t contradict our obligations in the framework of other international integration processes and organizations.

And now we are speaking of what had been publicly announced. Before the Eastern Partnership summit in Vilnius [in November 2013] Commissioner Ashton and me prepared a joint statement on that Armenia and EU are ready to develop and deepen cooperation in all possible formats and directions, considering the obligations of Yerevan in other integration formats and directions.

We announced about this also afterwards, both at the summit in Riga and in December when the talks with the EU resumed and we announced together with Ms Mogherini about the launch of new talks [on new EU-Armenia framework agreement]. Armenia was ready to resume them very quickly, but 28 countries in the EU were to give a mandate for the talks. But three stages of the talks have already taken place, being carried out as planned,” Nalbandian noted.