Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian praised the current level of relations between Armenia and Georgia as he hosted his Georgian counterpart Mamuka Bakhtadze in Yerevan on Monday.
Bakhtadze, who was elected head of the Georgian government in June, arrived in the Armenian capital on his first official visit to the neighboring country.
After longer-than-planned talks with Bakhtadze Pashinian spoke about “ambitious tasks” in the relations between the two countries.
“Today we had a very important conversation. During the negotiations we formulated quite ambitious tasks for the development of our further relations. Of course, the relations between Armenia and Georgia are brilliant, they are very good, and we face the task of bringing the economic component of our relations in conformity to the substantial, emotional level of relations that exists between our two peoples,” Pashinian said at a joint press conference with his Georgian counterpart.
The head of the Armenian government said that the Georgian prime minister presented “a very ambitious program.”
“And we fully support it,” Pashinian continued. “A concrete objective was formulated: to take our trade turnover to the level of $1 billion in the next few years. This is a concrete subject, for which we can have a clear roadmap and take concerted steps towards the implementation of this task.”
For his part, the Georgian leader expressed a hope that relations between Yerevan and Tbilisi will deepen in different directions.
“During today’s meeting my counterpart and I discussed the main directions of cooperation and emphasized our aspiration to intensify political relations. We discussed issues related to the spheres of transportation, energy, tourism, culture, education and innovations, and we made sure that we still have some untapped potential in many areas,” Bakhtadze said, as quoted by the Armenian prime minister’s official website.
The Georgian prime minister said that he also spoke with Pashinian about Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic integration process and “the significant progress that Georgia has made in this direction.”
“At the same time we welcome the activation of relations between Armenia and the European Union,” Bakhtadze said.
“We agreed to maintain the dynamics of high-level meetings and at the same time to support the holding of narrow-sector meetings.”
Facebook Forum