Source: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/28/eurasian-economic-union-russia-belarus-kazakhstan Until the last moment Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, held out for 7 October, to coincide with Vladimir Putin’s birthday. But in the end the parliament in Minsk ratified the treaty on Eurasian Economic Union on 9 October, the day before its first three members – Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan – were due to meet. It would be simplistic to reduce the nascent EEU to a toy in the hands of the Russian president. When it comes into force, on 1 January 2015, it will be the most advanced organisation for regional cooperation the former Soviet bloc has seen, an achievement preceded by many false starts. In fact, the EEU already exists. It has a headquarters – a glass building near Paveletsky railway station in Moscow – and officials who would not look out of place in Brussels. Its member states have already lifted some internal customs barriers and harmonised others for the outside world. So much for the practical side, what analyst Nicu Popescu describes in an article for the European Union Institute of Security Studies as the “real” EEU, a trading alliance slated to guarantee free circulation of goods, services and assets, but not hydrocarbons. The other Eurasian Union is “imaginary”, the brainchild of Putin, first mentioned in October 2011. As he sees it, this organisation will be the equal of the EU and other major regional entities, a powerful bloc that will matter on the world stage. Its official formation is also intended to show the world that Russia has fully recovered, while crowning Putin’s efforts to pull together the states making up the post-Soviet sphere of influence. Those who deride the scheme see it as an attempt to restore the empire. This dream foundered last November in Kiev, when the Maidan protests started. They carried away President Viktor Yanukovych, guilty in the eyes of the demonstrators of refusing an association agreement with the EU. Ukraine, with its population of 45 million, was supposed to play a key role in the EEU, on account of its economic clout and the place it occupies in the Russian imagination and worldview. “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire,” the former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in The Grand Chessboard, in 1997. Ukraine had to be punished, for wanting to move closer to Europe but also for refusing to join the EEU, after Yanukovych’s demise. Moscow started by restricting trade with its neighbour, then annexed part of its territory (Crimea) and finally fomented war in its eastern extremity. Russia has also put pressure on Moldova and Georgia, both of which have so far shunned the EEU. Putin Nazarbayev Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Both Belarus and Kazakhstan demanded subsidies in the form of gas or cash to join the EEU. Photograph: Dmitry Astakhov/AP Belarus and Kazakhstan have often voiced their concern at the treatment meted out to Ukraine. They have worked to limit the political weight of...