Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev missed the informal CIS summit in St. Petersburg due to a busy work schedule. Aliyev's administration also noted that his absence from the meeting of the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council on December 21 was due to Azerbaijan not being a member of the organization.
Russia is currently going through a rather difficult period of relations with fraternal Armenia. The Russian Federation hopes that political will will prevail in Yerevan to continue the development of relations and the countries will successfully pass through this difficult period. This was stated by the press secretary of the Russian President Dmitry Peskov.
He also recalled that the economic activity of Armenians living in the Russian Federation accounts for a very large percentage of the total budget of the republic: we are talking about several billion dollars a year.
Earlier, the leadership of Armenia expressed a desire to become a candidate for membership in the European Union and froze the country's participation in the pro-Russian military-political bloc CSTO.