Recent developments in the Karabakh front, among other things, confirmed one very important thing, rather the truth: international community is not concerned about conflicts in the former Soviet Union and no one will go farther than issuing high-profile declarations and “condemning”. Neither will they try to prevent transition of the conflict into a “hot” phase. World powers and the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs will intervene only when their own interests in a particular region are affected.

The 9th EU-Armenia Subcommittee meeting on trade, economic and related legal issues was held in Yerevan this week. The topics under discussion at the subcommittee included macroeconomic developments in Armenia, recent developments in the EU-Armenia bilateral trade, prospects for establishing an EU-Armenia Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area, developments in a number of trade and investment related regulatory areas such as technical regulations and standards, sanitary and phytosanitary issues, intellectual property rights and tax & customs issues. The subcommittee will also discussed EU trade-related assistance to Armenia, including preparations of the new Comprehensive Institution Building (CIB) program.

Yerevan hosted a conference of the Social International Committee of CIS, Caucasian and Black Sea states, which brought together representatives of socialistic parties from 13 CIS and European countries: Russia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Moldova, Greece, Hungary, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Palestine and Azerbaijan. Summarizing the conference results, Secretary General of Social International Luis Ayala noted that they have managed to fulfill all the planned tasks during the two-day conference. “Our primary goal is to spread democracy in all those countries where we are represented. In some countries, for example in Armenia, we have managed to form an open society, while in some countries it is a long-lasting process,” he said.

The Armenian government has discussed usage of Armenian Unicode fonts for state structures’ records. “Armenian state structures are using various encodings in their work. Moreover, their websites are often unreadable because of the encoding used,” Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan said. He also instructed all Ministers to open e-mails at gov.am domain. According to head of the government administration David Sargsyan, the problem may be resolved in a couple of weeks.

Secretary of the Armenian National Security Council Arthur Baghdasaryan met with Eurasia academy president Oleg Poptsov, rector of Moscow Institute of TV and Radio Vasily Karelsky, political observer Leonid Ioffe and rector of the Armenian Academy of TV and Radio hamlet Ghushyan to discuss information security and digitalization issues. “Armenian-Russian cultural ties need to be expanded,” the NSC Secretary said.