The importance of Ukraine's cooperation with the European Union should not be contrasted with that of its relationship with the Eurasian Union, said Ukraine's Prime Minister Mykola Azarov.
"Ukraine has never contrasted one economic organization with the other and we cannot do that from many points of view. We are in ‘between’ and we must have friends both here and there," he said at a meeting with members of the EU-Ukraine international club of parliamentarians and experts, who held a discussion entitled "Ukraine on the crossroads: the EU and/or the Eurasian Union: benefits and challenges" in Kyiv on Thursday.
"Before our meeting I was about to suggest a small amendment: you were right to put the word ‘and’ between the EU and the Eurasian Union but I would remove the ‘or’," the prime minister added.
The EU and the Eurasian Union account for 70% of Ukraine’s trade, he said. At the same time, at the legislative level Ukraine has decided to move toward European integration, Azarov said.
The Eurasian Union is a project of the confederative union of states with a common political, economic, military, customs, humanitarian, cultural space to be created around the Union of Kazakhstan, Russia and Belarus and the relevant closely integrated CIS structures: the Eurasian Economic Community, the Eurasian Economic Space, the Collective Security Treaty Organization and the Customs Union.
