Page 24 - bne IntelliNews newspaper 14 July 2017

Opinion
July 14, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 24
the break-up of the Soviet Union, the non-Russian countries have been looking for ways to re-integrate, starting with a speech by Kazakh President Nursul- tan Nazarbayev in 1994 calling for the creation of a Eurasian Economic Union. The Russians did nothing more than pay this lip-service for decades, because they had plenty of internal problems of their own, without having to take on those of their neighbours.
The start of the OBOR strategy seems to have caused a re-think in the Kremlin. Someone (we think it was First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shu- valov) took a look at the map and understood its implications for Russia’s role in China’s economic future. This probably happened in 2011 or 2012. The next step in the argument was also elegant. The Kremlin realised that they had a ready-made solution at hand, as Nazarbayev had been pushing for some years to revive the economic integration of the former Soviet Union, and Russia now had a reason to give him what he wanted.
Just as the core axis of the European Union is the economic integration of Germany and France, so the backbone of the EEU is Russia and Kazakhstan. By locking in Kazakhstan, Russia gets a direct seat
at the table of talks about OBOR. Kazakhstan gets an allaying of its fear of being too dependent on China and sharing the fate of Mongolia. It now has access to Russian markets as well, and can talk to the Chinese on less unequal terms. Russia can bring in Belarus as well, which creates a land cor- ridor all the way to the border of the EU.
Once you understand the economic and political geography of the EEU, it becomes much harder to dismiss it as “an attempt to re-create the Soviet Union” as I heard one European diplomat describe it. One reason why Russia does not want to re- create the Soviet Union is that it required large transfers of resources from Russia to the rest
of the Union, and Russia wants those resource for itself. Put more bluntly, Putin is reported to have told a Western businessman, who asked him about whether he wanted to annex Eastern Ukraine: “Do you really think I want seven million more pensioners?”
Given this motivation, it becomes easier to un- derstand why Russia is putting resources into the EEU, and sacrificing so much sovereignty to it. You only have to visit the EEU’s headquarters, and talk