AKI, Italy
May 9 2005

RUSSIA: FOCUS – PUTIN UPBEAT BUT CIS DRIFTING APART

Moscow, 9 May (AKI) – On Sunday, Russian president Valdimir Putin was
sounding upbeat over the future of the Commonwealth of Independent
States (CIS) which groups together Russia with 12 of the former
Soviet Union’s 15 republics. “The friendship between the people of
the Commonwealth of Independent States cannot cease and cannot be
destroyed. We will resolve all the problems together,” he said at a
CIS summit in the Russian capital.

The gathering of CIS leaders ahead of the celebrations on Monday for
the 60th anniversary of the Allies’ victory in Europe during World
War II, mark a new attempt by Putin to reassert Russia’s traditional
leading role over the region. But despite Putin’s optimistic tone,
Moscow’s influence is fast eroding amid Washington’s growing support
for attempts by many former Soviet republics to wrestle free from
Russia’s grip.

Putin spoke of the need for “greater cultural cooperation,” between
member-states and the need to “put up a common fight against
terrorism – the new Nazism of the 21st Century,” however, the Russian
leader could not mask the cracks that are threatening to tear the CIS
apart.

>From the onset, the summit was marred by important defections, and
not just those of the three Baltic republics – Estonia, Lativa and
Lithuania – who have always refused to join the CIS, a stance which
has further hardened following their membership to the EU.

Georgian president Michail Saakashvili snubbed Sunday’s event to
protest the failure by Russia’s military to withdraw from several
bases in Georgia. The president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliev cited as
his reason for not turning up, the presence of Armenian president
Robert Kocharian who the Azerbaijani’s blame for the deadlock over
the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

But even some of the leaders who did attend, appeared to signal that
their presence was nothing more than a gesture of courtesy towards
their Russian hosts, rather than any deep sentiment of belonging.

Prominent among these was the Western-backed, newly elected Ukrainian
president Victor Yuschenko – who through the popular Orange
Revolution mass protests overcame electoral fraud by his
Moscow-backed opponent Victor Yanukovich – and Moldavian president,
Vladimir Voronin, who despite his Communist origins has said his
country should “rather look West than East.”

Uzbekistan’s president, Islam Karimov is another leader whose faith
in the CIS seems to be wavering. Just before his departure for
Moscow, he told the the Uzbeki news agency Uzreprot that the “CIS is
facing a great crisis and does not have much of a future.”

Some leaders including Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko,
described as “the last dictator left in the heart of Europe,” by the
American secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Armenia’s Kocharian
a long-time Moscow ally, remain staunchily loyal to the CIS concept.

But their support may not be enough to give the CIS, and by default,
Moscow enough clout in regional politics.

There signs are also ominous in the spheres of security and economic
cooperation.

Since 1999, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldavia
have formed GUUAM, a pro-Western security alliance to rival the CIS’s
Collective Security Agreement (CSA) made up of Belarus, Russia,
Armenia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

A free-trade arrangement between CIS remains stillborn for now while
new economic ventures such as the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan natural gas and
oil pipelines developed with strong backing by Western
multi-nationals have all but excluded Russia from a stake in the
region’s rich natural and energy resources.