It’s become so fashionable to automatically diss everything Putin does that critics are rarely forced to use their brains.
That’s the only way to explain the curious liberal denunciations of the Eurasian Union, a free-trade economic and political bloc of major former Soviet states that Putin is rushing to get started.
After all, what liberal could be opposed to a tariff-free economic zone?
What’s more, far from luring Ukraine away from EU membership (now no longer looking quite so attractive in the first place), the Union would give Ukraine somewhere to go after getting rejected by Europe. Let’s not forget this fact: Russia is not wrenching Ukraine from Europe. Europe was the one that closed its doors to Ukraine. Writes Fred Weir:
“Last week the EU cancelled a meeting to discuss a free-trade deal with Ukraine in protest over what it views as the politically-motivated jailing of Yulia Tymoshenko, Ukraine’s top opposition leader. That was just the latest in a string of signs that Ukraine, the most important former Soviet state next to Russia, may be headed for a major geopolitical realignment”.
Liberal opposition member Boris Nemtsov argues that such a bloc would be undemocratic (because the EU is so democratic, right?) because the member states are authoritarian. The latter is true, of course. But Nemtsov is wrong in implying that the Union would go against the will of the people.
“Putin believes the collapse of the USSR was a great tragedy and he would like to recreate some version of it”, says Nemtsov. He is right. Except, he missed out a crucial aspect: that most residents of the former Soviet space support the idea of a union.
Putin’s venture is nearly identical to Gorbachev’s doomed dream of a Soviet confederation that was supposed to have come out of the Union Treaty, which the hard-line coup plotters torpedoes by arresting him in August 1991.
Referendum results indicated that most citizens supported the treaty. Instead, Yeltsin and the Ukrainian and Belarusian presidents secretly met and tore up the USSR altogether- an undemocratic, conspiratorial decision overwhelming majorities in most Soviet republics deeply regretted, and continue to do.
The poetic justice in Putin’s Eurasian Union is that its core members Russia, Belarus and Ukraine are finally beginning to fix what they broke 20 years ago.
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