Leaders of EAEU countries meet in Yerevan last week

6 октября 2019

The leaders of the EAEU countries met in Yerevan. The movement towards integration is not as fast as we would like it to be. The trade without barriers is not yet possible. It would seem that the target is good. In words, all FOR is that there would be fewer obstacles to the movement of goods, services, capital, labor. But in fact, it's not easy to give up national selfishness. 

As our President has aptly pointed out, - the countries of the Eurasian Economic Union should first of all think about how to find happiness within the association and to develop trade with third countries. 

The EAEU has proved its solvency for almost 5 years. The core of the union was Belarus, Russia and Kazakhstan. Then Armenia and Kyrgyzstan joined it. But the integration is expanding  to the East. Apart from the President of Moldova, who has observer status, the head of Iran and the Prime Minister of Singapore visited the event. 

Among the main results was the EAEU free trade agreement with Singapore. 

EAEU partners share the opinion of Belarus - every leader has expressed the need to remove the barriers in one way or another. But in practice, it turns out that it is not so easy, when there are national interests on the scales next to the collective ones. Obviously, the Eurasian five will be promoting digitalization in every possible way, in order to make the bureaucracy less burdensome. 

Among those, who is interested in the Eurasian integration,  there are Serbia, Egypt, and even India. It has become known that Uzbekistan is studying the possibility of joining the EAEU. 

Sergey Kizima, political scientist: "Belarus constantly reminds that barriers and restrictions have an extremely negative impact on mutual trade, while mutual trade is one of the reasons for the EAEU to develop faster."