ASTANA, May 29 (RIA Novosti) – Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has arrived in Kazakhstan to attend a milestone meeting of the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council and sign a treaty to set up a Eurasian economic union, which is a trade zone of ex-Soviet states modelled on the EU.
The Council’s Thursday session will bring together the leaders of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan who are expected to seal the deal on paper in the Kazakh capital Astana later today. The treaty will then be ratified by the nation’s parliaments, with the target date of January 1, 2015.
The accord will also finalize the establishment of CIS’s biggest common market, a fledgling free-trade zone known as the Single Economic Space, which is to become a new global powerhouse.
Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan already have a customs union, but now plan to go further by removing trade barriers altogether.
According to the Kremlin, the Eurasian Economic Union will raise the integration of the three neighbor states to a completely new level. “The three nations will be committed to guarantee an unfettered flow of goods, services, capitals and workforce, coordinate their key policies, including energy, industry, agriculture and transport,” it said in a statement Monday.
The prospect of an EU-like space spanning both Europe and Asia has aroused interest from several other countries in the region, such as Armenia, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. The Eurasian Economic Council on Thursday will consider bids from the acceding members, including a roadmap for Kyrgyzstan’s entry.
The treaty turns a new page on the Eurasian economic integration within the framework of a supra-national Eurasian Economic Community, which stems from the Commonwealth of Independent States. Conceived in 2000, the community served as a vehicle to create a Customs Union in 2010 and a Single Economic Space in 2012.
The two organizations were effectively stepping stones towards a broader economic alliance of former Soviet States that is to be based on a single market space with some 170 million people and 85 percent of CIS’s total GDP.
The union is in no way going to mimic the Soviet Union, it has been underscored. Over the past years, Vladimir Putin has multiple times reiterated that the new bloc won't seek to take up where the Soviet countries left off because it would be too naïve to copy what was abandoned in the past.
Russia’s Asian pivot and the move towards greater Eurasian integration come at a time when its relations with the West have been soured by the deepening Ukraine crisis and tight unilateral sanctions piled on Moscow by the EU and US.
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