“The Parliament of Armenia has approved in the first reading a draft law to launch the country’s accession process to the European Union,” Armenia’s parliament speaker Alen Simonyan wrote in a post on X.
The bill was initiated after a petition calling on the authorities to launch the process garnered more than the 50,000 signatures needed for it to be discussed in parliament.
Reality check: The process of joining the EU can take decades, as the process involves six so-called clusters, subdivided into a total of 35 so-called chapters, and includes evaluations of a country’s compliance with EU criteria in a wide range of policy areas such as the functioning of democratic institutions, the judiciary and fundamental rights, among many, many others.
Montenegro, for example, opened its first chapter more than a decade ago — and has 30 more to go.
Regardless, Armenia’s pivot follows the country’s growing tensions with Russia, historically one of its top allies.
In 2024, the government in Yerevan announced it would quit the Kremlin-led Collective Security Treaty Organization — Moscow’s answer to NATO — accusing the alliance of failing to intervene when the country was attacked by neighboring Azerbaijan.
However, Armenia still depends heavily on Russian energy and trade, and hosts a Kremlin military base, illustrating the difficult of totally breaking off relations with Moscow.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Overchuk recently compared Armenia’s EU aspirations to “buying a ticket on Titanic” and warned it of economic consequences.