MINSK. May 22 (Interfax) - The Eastern Partnership needs to be more "flexible" and "pragmatic" and to accommodate the "increasingly divergent interests" of some of its participants, the Belarus foreign minister insisted on Friday.
"The growing number of challenges that we have to deal with and the increasingly divergent interests of partner countries need further reviewing, and the Eastern Partnership needs to revise its logic, methodology and mechanisms in order to preserve its unity and importance for all its participants as a joint regional project," the Belarusian Foreign Ministry quoted Minister Vladimir Makei as saying at an Eastern Partnership summit in Riga.
"We need a more flexible, focused and pragmatic Eastern Partnership that accommodates the interest and priorities of each participant state."
Such flexibility would open up various kinds of opportunities for cooperation between Eastern Partnership participants and the European Union and would become the optimum format of relations between them, Makei argued.
"To be re-consolidated, the increasingly disunited Eastern Partnership should focus on economic affairs. This would make us more stable and make any modernization efforts more effective," he said.
Belarus would hail greater attention being paid to trade and to projects to build out transportation and energy infrastructures, Makei said. "In this context we are satisfied with the general support within the Eastern Partnership format for the Belarusian initiative to harmonize the digital markets of the EU and partner countries. We assume that this is one of the issues that are highly significant for the future development of all of us, and joint projects in that industry would be in everyone's interest," he said.
Makei said Belarus expected its proposals concerning the Eastern Partnership would receive proper consideration in the course of the current revision of the EU's European Neighborhood Policy.