Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia

Russia inspired virtually all of the agreements inked. But cold realities belied ringing declarations of intent and the facade of teamwork. Not a few of the centrifugal forces unleashed by the disintegration of the USSR raged on unabated, making lofty goals, reports and guidelines all but unfulfillable. The parliament of Ukraine, a co-author of and the second-ranking member of the CIS, refused to ratify its charter. Ukrainian presidents dutifully attended CIS summit meetings while doing their best to ‘derail Russian ideas as early on as at the level of experts, ministers, and prime ministers’.[62] In the ambit of economic coordination, the provisions of the 1993 treaty were honoured in the breach. Protectionism, national currencies (following the collapse of the short-lived rouble zone in 1993) and cumbersome banking rules were put in its place and intra-regional trade plummeted by two-thirds. The centrality of the CIS accord was undercut by the decision of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan in 1995 to forge a trilateral customs union, which later garnered two more Central Asian adherents and the lofty title of the Eurasian Economic Community.[63] This entity, too, made little headway. Yet another geo-economic structure, the Single Economic Space (SES) among Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, was announced in September 2003.[64] In keeping with the trend, it proved to be another paper tiger.

Entropy was, if anything, more manifest in the security sphere. Six CIS members – Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – had signed onto the Tashkent Treaty on collective security in 1992; three others (Azerbaijan, Belarus and Georgia) did so in 1993 and the treaty came into force in 1994. Lacking a common external enemy, the treaty had no practical consequences in the 1990s, particularly since several of its members were for all intents and purposes at war with each other. An institutional arm to carry out its provisions did not exist until the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) was created in 2002, ten years after the pact. Membership by that point was down to six: Russia, two of six In-Betweens (Armenia and Belarus) and three of five Central Asians (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan).[65] The CSTO operates out of a Moscow headquarters and conducts exercises among its members; in theory it has even had a rapid-reaction force at its disposal since 2009. In practice, the ‘collective’ element of its mission has, given power asymmetries, always been lacking; it functions mostly as a Russian security blanket for the smaller neighbours.

A close study of both security-and economic-policy fields by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found in 1999 that ‘all of the post-Soviet states, including Russia, are too weak, distracted, and poor to be able to integrate’. ‘Even the few common undertakings to which the CIS states have been able to agree have either been carried out shoddily or not at all, because neither Russia nor the other CIS states have the money to pay for them.’[66]

Nor did Russia have the organisational arena to itself. In October 1997 four In-Between abstainers or dropouts from the CSTO and the Economic Union Treaty formed a rival group known as GUAM, after the founding parties of Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova. GUAM was a talk shop about how to keep the Russians at bay and open up channels to the West (doing the talking in Russian, its official language). It gained observer status at the UN General Assembly in 2003, but would wait until 2006 to organise a secretariat (with all of eight staffers) in Kyiv. The member governments announced a free-trade area in July 2002 and signed a sprinkling of joint statements, installed a parliamentary assembly and working groups, and discussed at length a Europe–Caucasus–Asia Transport Corridor and a GUAM peacekeeping brigade. Little of substance came of these initiatives, which can be attributed to the same constellation of factors that plagued the Russia-led projects.[67] GUAM tried but was ultimately unable to widen its membership: Uzbekistan, which signed on in 2001 (making it GUUAM), ceased to participate in 2002 and abandoned it in 2005.