Have you ever seen any open coercion from the West or the East? I don't remember because we were taking steps that were stemming from the interests of our country, and we had nothing to do with adventurism. The third President of Armenia, Serzh Sargsyan, told this to reporters after his court session Thursday.

"If we [Armenia] hadn't continued our relations with the CSTO, then we wouldn't have had billions of dollars worth of weapons. Of course, today's [Armenian] authorities were calling them ‘scrap metal;’ but we see that this ‘scrap metal’ is used by skilled users—for example, in Ukraine,” Sargsyan said.

“If we hadn’t become a member in the EAEU, the economy of today's Armenia would’ve collapsed. For exactly two years, I was proposing and asking at first the [Eurasian] Customs Union, then the EAEU, the member countries to accept Armenia to that organization because not becoming a member in that organization would’ve led to the situation that was created in Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine. At that time, a major part of our economy was agriculture. So where would we have sold our brandy, apricots? So many greenhouses. Could we have taken to Turkey to sell tomatoes? Our EU partners knew about that very clearly. The public knew well that we were negotiating simultaneously with both the Customs Union—that preceded the EAEU—and the EU for two years," added the third president of Armenia.

And to the question whether it is possible to cooperate with one country in economic matters, but with another country in terms of security, Serzh Sargsyan said: "No. It is impossible to have a security environment in one place, an economic [one] in the other."