MINSK, July 17, /ITAR-TASS/. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko regards as prospective his country’s participation in the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU).

“The adopted EEU treaty is not quite the document that we were anticipating for but nevertheless it marks a step forward. It was not a step we were looking forward to but a movement forward anyway,” Lukashenko said at a meeting with the country’s high-ranking diplomats on Thursday.

Belarus’s participation in the EEU “is not a failure, not a movement in the wrong direction but in the right one where we are expected to be and what we cannot reject in any case,” he said.

Lukashenko is confident Belarus “will have to live in the EEU in the coming decades” so “we must target a qualitative breakthrough into Russia’s and Kazakhstan’s markets.”

Lukashenko believes in the long run Ukraine will have to restore ties with the Eurasian Economic Union.

“Despite all the events around the association agreement with the European Union and etc, the Ukrainians have always been pragmatic and there is no way around their cooperation with the EEU.