Kyrgyzstan interested in joining Customs Union, common economic area - PM
MOSCOW. Dec 28 (Interfax) - Kyrgyzstan is interested in joining the Customs Union and the common economic area, Kyrgyz Prime Minister Almazbek Atambayev said at a meeting with Russian presidential chief of staff Sergei Naryshkin in Moscow.
"Kyrgyzstan and Russia have a common past, and I think our future will be common as well. We see Kyrgyzstan as part of the Customs Union, and we see Kyrgyzstan as part of the common economic area," Atambayev said.
"We once belonged to a great country, but nobody is barring us from being part of the common economic area and the Customs Union," he said.
"I would like to stress that Russia is Kyrgyzstan's main strategic partner. We will surely be friends with all countries in the world, but our strategic partner is Russia, and there is no alternative to this," he said.
The new Kyrgyz government's top priority is "to bring relations between Kyrgyzstan and Russia to an absolutely different level, so as to return trust, so that all those good projects and plans that have been declared for decades but have not been implemented should finally begin being implemented, so that Russian investors should enter Kyrgyzstan, and so that we should become true strategic partners in deeds, not only in words," he said.