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Russia eyes economic union with Belarus and Kazakhstan
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Russian President Vladimir Putin said yesterday the final pieces were in place for the 2015 launch of an economic union with Belarus and Kazakhstan that Moscow hopes can also be joined by Ukraine.
Putin promised following talks with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev and Belarussian leader Alexander Lukashenko that the so-called Eurasian Economic Union would turn into a new source of growth for all involved.
The alliance would replace a much looser Eurasian Customs Union that Russia formed with the two ex-Soviet nations in an effort to build up a free trade rival to the 28-nation European Union bloc.
“Government representatives of the troika (Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus) ... have developed the draft of the institutional part of the Eurasian Economic Union agreement,” Putin said in televised remarks.
“This document determines the international legal status, organizational frameworks, the objectives and mechanisms of how the union will operate starting on January 1, 2015.”
Putin has made the creation of a post-Soviet economic union that could one day even be joined by nations such as Turkey and India the keystone project of his third Kremlin term.
Russia has put immense pressure on Ukraine to join the alliance and threatened economic sanctions against Kiev when it was on the verge of signing a landmark trade and political association deal with Brussels last month.
Kiev’s decision to spurn the EU pact sparked the biggest protests since the 2004 pro-democracy Orange Revolution and exposed the deep cultural rifts between the nationalist west of Ukraine and its more Russified eastern parts.
But the size of those rallies began to ebb when Ukraine agreed a US$15-billion bailout package with Russia that also included a one-third cut in the price Moscow charges its neighbor for natural gas.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov said during talks in Moscow with his counterpart Dmitry Medvedev that Kiev had just got the first US$3-billion tranche of the Russian rescue plan.
“This is a stabilizing factor for us,” the Ukrainian government website quoted Azarov as saying before he joined Putin at the Eurasian meeting.
“Thanks to the reached agreements, our ratings went up. We came out of the zone that we were in,” Azarov said.
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