Tuesday, December 28, 2021
Meeting with CIS state representatives
Putin seeks proximity to the former Soviet states
Russia has many ex-Soviet republics such as Belarus among its allies. Now President Putin wants to further develop the cooperation with them and invites you to talk. But with some of the former USSR states, cooperation is no longer an option.
30 years after the end of the Soviet Union, Russian President Vladimir Putin has called for further cooperation with countries of the former giant empire. At a meeting of the Moscow-dominated Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in St. Petersburg, he said, according to the Kremlin, that many things have changed dramatically over the past few decades.
The founding of the organization in December 1991 was therefore justified with a view to security and economic issues. The loose association came about before the Soviet Union officially ceased to exist at the end of December 1991 – after around 70 years. With the organization, the cooperation from the Soviet era should be continued. But after the collapse, the former republics developed too differently. “I have to say that the bonds that have remained since the days of the Soviet Union play a positive role by and large,” Putin said.
Russia has many ex-Soviet republics such as Belarus, Kazakhstan in Central Asia and Armenia in the Caucasus among its allies. Putin did not mention that neighboring Ukraine, for example, no longer cooperated in protest against the Russian annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014, or Georgia after an attack by Russia in 2008. Moscow is demanding binding security guarantees from the West in the face of many conflicts. So NATO should not undertake any further eastward expansion. The western military alliance has shown no willingness to accommodate in this direction.
For weeks, the West has been particularly concerned about the findings that Russia has pulled together tens of thousands of soldiers in areas not far from Ukraine. The Ministry of Defense in Moscow announced on Saturday that more than 10,000 soldiers would return to their bases after a maneuver. It remained unclear how many of them had been on the border with Ukraine.