Ex-Soviet states join Russia’s union
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RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin yesterday signed a deal creating an economic union with ex-Soviet states Belarus and Kazakhstan, with Ukraine conspicuously absent after it turned its back on Moscow.
“Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan are going over to a fundamentally new level of cooperation,” Putin said at the signing ceremony in the Kazakh capital of Astana.
The newly created Eurasian Economic Union will come into force on January 1, 2015. It guarantees free circulations of goods, services, capital and labor and means that the members have to agree on certain areas of economic policy.
Trade turnover between the three countries in 2013 totaled US$66.2 billion, Putin said.
The project is hugely symbolic for Putin, who in 2005 called the breakup of the Soviet Union “the biggest geopolitical disaster” of the 20th century.
“The agreement signed really has epoch-making historic significance,” Putin said,
“This strengthens the competitiveness of our countries in the world economy.”
Two other ex-Soviet states, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan, are on track to join the union, Putin said.
But the union crucially failed to secure the participation of Ukraine, a country of 46 million with a potentially strong industrial sector.
“We lost some along the way: I mean Ukraine,” Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko said at the signing ceremony. “I am sure that sooner or later the Ukrainian leadership will realize where its fortune lies.”
The alliance will follow a much looser Eurasian Customs Union that Russia formed with the two ex-Soviet nations in 2010 in an effort to build up a free trade rival to the 28-nation European Union.
Putin hinted that discussions had been far from smooth with Belarus and Kazakhstan’s strongmen leaders.
“It was hard to come to agreement on all these questions up to this moment,” Putin said. “I don’t want to say there were rows, but still there were heated arguments, heated discussions.”
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