“Very important changes have taken place in our region, namely Georgia received the status of an official candidate for accession to the European Union. Two of our neighbors have this status (including Turkey). And if we used to say: “Where is the EU and where is our region,” now the EU is in fact and in essence our region,” said Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan during government hour in parliament.

On December 14, 2023, the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, announced that EU leaders had granted candidate status to Georgia. Turkey has had candidate status since 1999. To date, 16 out of 35 positions in the so-called negotiation dossier on Turkey's accession to the EU remain open.

A little earlier, Pashinyan said that Armenia can no longer be Russia’s military partner. “We need to understand with whom we should develop military and military-technical cooperation. In the past there was no such question, just as there were no difficulties with the concept. In the past, Armenia's defense relations were 97% related to Russia. Now this cannot happen due to objective and subjective reasons,” Pashinyan said.

According to him, it is necessary to understand what kind of relations to build in this direction with India, Iran, the USA, France and the Russian Federation. By the end of the year, Yerevan will adopt a new concept for the development of the army, in which it will reconsider interaction with other states and set out an idea of ​​who and how the country should cooperate in the defense sector, Pashinyan shared.