EU/ARMENIA : HOW EU-RUSSIA RIVALRY STYMIES ARMENIA'S EUROPEAN ASPIRATIONS.

• Position: European Union

When the European Commission concluded talks about association and free trade with Armenia, Russia's president played out his card. He offered the Caucasus state something that Europe did not. Samuel Farmanyan, co-chair of the EU-Armenia Parliamentary Cooperation Committee, puts it bluntly: "We have always told our EU partners that Armenia is committed to developing its relations with the EU but never to the detriment of our strategic partnership with Russia. If it comes to the point of making a choice, Armenia has no other option but to choose its security".

Back in September, when Vladimir Putin received his Armenian counterpart, Serzh Sargsyan, in Moscow, he invited the small Caucasian republic to join the Customs Union, a retro-style economic zone of former Soviet states set up in 2009 by Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Sargsyan said yes'.

"I was shocked," Naira Zohrabyan, chair of the Standing Committee for European Integration at the Armenian Parliament, confesses. The mood in Armenia's capital Yerevan is gloomy some weeks ahead of the summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, that was supposed to seal the Eastern Partnership and to bind Armenia closer to the European Union, together with Georgia, Moldova and above all - Ukraine. "It's painful for me to see our cooperation weakened," says Zohrabyan, who is a leading member of the pro-business, former ruling party Prosperous Armenia. "Our place is in the European family."

Brussels was quick to reject Yerevan's decision: membership of Russia's Customs Union, High Representative Catherine Ashton had warned, is incompatible with the EU association agreement and the DCFTA as its integral element. Diplomacy, however, draws a different lesson: Armenia, technically still at war with neighbouring Azerbaijan, blockaded by Turkey and dependent on Russia for its security and energy supply, should never have been put in a position to choose between survival and a thousand-page agreement of association with the EU.

The draft of the Vilnius declaration leaves a blank space for Armenia. Both sides are equally at a loss about how four years of successful negotiations between Brussels and Yerevan could end up in a void. Now, Armenians wonder what the future might hold for them. Russia, Belarus or Kazakhstan - the soon-to-be-partners in the Customs Union - are not exactly the model for statebuilding Armenia is looking for, NGO representatives as well as politicians in Yerevan admit. "There is no potential in it,"...