Tag Archives: Eurasian Economic Union

The SCO’s recent membership expansion presents both opportunities and challenges as the organization’s cohesiveness, effectiveness and policy coordination will go through a period of refocusing, redefining and re-energizing.

Members of the Russian-led EaEU are scheduled to establish the legal and regulatory framework to create a Single Economic Space by January 2015. But Kazakhstan has become increasingly wary of Russia’s political influence. Kazakhstan is constrained politically by the far superior military power of its northern neighbor. Most of Kazakhstan’s population along the Russia–Kazakhstan border are ethnic Russians. Fears within Kazakhstan about Moscow’s intentions have heightened due to Russia’s March 2014 annexation of Crimea.

On Sunday, Crimea voted to split away from Ukraine and return to the Russian fold. For a vast majority of Crimea’s Russian-speaking population this is an act of redressing a monumental injustice that happened in 1991 when Crimea, which geographically, ethnically and historically is more Russian than many regions of Russia itself, became part of a foreign state as the …