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Georgiy Voloshin examines the motivations underpinning Russia's push to establish a "Eurasian Union" in Central Asia.  Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. To view the full article, please visit: http://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/russias-eurasian-union-a-bid-for-hegemony-4730/ Russia’s Eurasian Union: A Bid for Hegemony? Georgiy Voloshin - Sep 24, 12 Geopoliticalmonitor.com In early October 2011, the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who later became the country’s president, wrote a now-famous newspaper article “A New Integration Project for Eurasia: A Future That is Born Today”. In this pre-electoral piece (it was already known that Putin, not Medvedev, would run for president on behalf of the United Russia party), Russia’s strongman proposed the creation of a vast economic bloc known as the Eurasian Union which, in Mr. Putin’s view, would enable its member states to “become leaders of global growth and civilized progress, and to attain success and prosperity”. This new entity of regional integration in the post-Soviet space should build not only on the experience of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), but also on its two successors: the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEc) created in 2000 and the Customs Union between Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus formalized ten years later [1].   Interestingly, the idea of a Eurasian Union was first proposed not by Putin, but by Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev back in 1994. At the time, the Kazakh leader strongly defended the inclusion of five post-Soviet states–Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan–into the Union’s permanent framework, while its further expansion would encompass Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia and even such autonomous territories as Georgia’s South Ossetia and Abkhazia as full-fledged members. Unfortunately for Nazarbayev, Russia’s flirting with the West [2], its enormous economic difficulties [3] as well as Boris Yeltsin’s lukewarm attitude towards Russia’s CIS partners prevented such a project from materializing and put other integration plans on the backburner for years. As the global competition for markets and resources has intensified in this last decade, with China recently surpassing Japan as the world’s second largest economy and the United States and EU countries struggling against the specter of recession, Moscow has manifestly set out on a course of accelerated rapprochement with its former satellites. By consolidating its ties with Belarus and Kazakhstan, and also by practicing a stick-and-carrot approach to Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, Russia expects to strengthen its strategic neighborhood and secure access to local markets. However, Moscow also aspires to the role of a regional hegemon, decades after the collapse of the Soviet empire.   Russia’s Strategic Neighborhood Kazakhstan and Belarus have traditionally been Russia’s best partners and allies in the former USSR. According to RAND experts writing about the Russian foreign policy in 2009, “[…] Kazakhstan and Belarus are frequently recognized as Russia’s closest friends, whereas the three Baltic states and Georgia are seen as unfriendly toward Russia [4].” The strengthening of ties with each of these two countries is considered by the Kremlin as a prerequisite for the further expansion of its geostrategic influence over to other neighboring territories, such as Ukraine and Moldova in Europe or Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan in post-Soviet Central Asia. Both Kazakhstan and Belarus actively participate in the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) created in 2002 for the purpose of jointly confronting security risks and challenges to domestic stability. They are also the primary consumers of Russian military technologies and equipment, benefiting from special contracts directly concluded among dozens, if not hundreds, of industrials. To view the full article, please visit: http://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/russias-eurasian-union-a-bid-for-hegemony-4730/