Putin's Wars полностью

Putin’s article is a textbook case of active disinformation. What is at stake for the Kremlin in the project for a Eurasian Union remains carefully hidden. However, one week after the signing ceremony by the three presidents in Moscow it was possible to get a clearer idea of the way of thinking of the Russian political elite. On November 24, 2011, they came together to discuss the new project in the building of the Federation Council, the Russian Upper House. The title the organizers had chosen for this roundtable was in itself interesting. It was called “Big Country: Perspectives of the Integrative Processes in the Post-Soviet Space in the Framework of the ‘Eurasian Union.’”^[22] Big country! The first catchword used to describe the new Union was not “economic modernization” or “economic cooperation,” but “big country.” One cannot but think of the centuries-old Russian fixation on territorial expansion. Had not Putin already said in 2009 in a speech before the Russian Geographical Society: “When we say great, a great country, a great state—certainly size matters. . . . When there is no size, there is no influence, no meaning.”^[23] In the same vein, on the occasion of the signing of the treaty, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said: “Yes, we are all different but we have common values and a desire to live in a single big state.”^[24] “A single big state”? It is not sure that the CIS countries, after having been reassured by Putin that their autonomy would not be jeopardized in the Eurasian Union, would welcome the prospect of living in “a big state.” And certainly they would appreciate even less the prospect of living in “a single big state.”

Expansionism Even Beyond Former Soviet Frontiers?

However, for some Russian analysts Moscow’s integrationist fervor should not stop at the frontiers of the former empire. Dmitry Orlov, a political scientist, wrote that the Eurasian Union should not only bring together the countries of the former Soviet Union, but should equally include “Finland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Mongolia, Vietnam and Bulgaria, as well as two countries not in either Europe or Asia, Cuba and Venezuela.”^[25] For Orlov, the Kremlin should not satisfy itself with reuniting the parts of the former Soviet Union, but it should aim higher, trying to restore the whole former communist bloc—and even beyond (Finland). Dmitry Rogozin, deputy prime minister and former ambassador to NATO, was quoted as saying that the project was designed “to unite not so much lands, but rather peoples and citizens in the name of a common state body.”^[26] Rogozin, a Russian ultranationalist, who always wanted to activate the Russian diaspora abroad and even create new Russian diaspora (he was, for instance, in favor of responding positively to the request of the estimated twenty thousand Serbs in Kosovo, applying for Russian citizenship), went even further than Orlov. He wanted not only to assemble a maximum number of countries into the Eurasian Union, but also the Russian diaspora “in the name of a common state body.” It led Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to declare that the project represented “the most savage idea of Russian nationalists,” adding that when Russia announces such ideas, “as a rule, they try to implement them.”^[27]

During the “Big Country” conference former prime minister Yevgeny Primakov was more prudent. According to him the Eurasian Union should start with building a Belarusian-Russian-Kazakh Union. “For the time being one should not go beyond this framework,” he said, [notwithstanding the fact that] Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are knocking on the door.”^[28] According to him one should not repeat the mistakes of the EU, which was in crisis because of its too rapid enlargement process. In the same vein a Chinese expert warned that building a Eurasian Union “is an uphill road. . . . Former Soviet republics are unlikely to go for integration with Russia gratis. . . . The accession of former Soviet republics to the Eurasian Union will hardly be a boon for Russia. The Belarusian economy is highly unstable and if such poor countries as Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan join the Eurasian Union, Moscow may face even bigger problems than the EU does over Greece.”^[29]

The Eurasian Union as the Ultimate

Integration Effort