The Eurasian Union has Been Harmed by Putin's Adventures in Ukraine

t was never meant as a return to the Soviet Union. When Kazakhstan's president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, first called for a Eurasian Union just over 20 years ago, he envisaged a grouping of individual states with individual interests coming together for the economic benefit of one another. Nazarbayev, an iron-fisted autocrat and the only president an independent Kazakhstan has ever known, cited, seemingly without irony, "the will of the people to integration" as he tried to justify the reintegration of independent states the Soviet Union's demise had left behind.

On May 29, Nazarbayev witnessed this goal finally come to fruition. Sort of. Alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko, Nazarbayev signed the founding treaty of the Eurasian Union (EEU) in Astana, paving the way for the transition from their current customs union to the full-fledged EEU on Jan. 1, 2015. Putin called the signing an event of "epoch-making significance."

But Putin has a way of mangling rhetoric and reality. While the EEU seeks to rejoin the post-Soviet space in economic agglomeration -- and has even received interested partners from Vietnam to Syria -- it stands far from the goal Nazarbayev once held, and even further from what irredentist Putin would hope.

Rather than launching a wholesale effort at post-Soviet reintegration, the EEU has rapidly morphed into something far more degraded -- and has faced substantive pushback from states watching Putin attempt to shift the EEU into another vehicle for Russia's revanchism, displayed so obviously in Crimea. Where the concerns on the EEU were originally economic -- the benefits are discernibly slanted toward Moscow -- events in Ukraine have displayed that the Kremlin's neo-imperialism is back. "The original purpose of the Eurasian Union was to become a dominant regional economic organization, with a legal architecture controlled by Moscow," said Alexander Cooley, a political science professor at Barnard College. But Crimea ended up illustrating that Putin would much rather have something to "effectively lock countries into Moscow's political and economic orbit."

Modeled on the European Union's economic constructs, the new union will represent a market of 170 million, and will boast a total GDP of nearly $3 trillion. The EEU will serve as the maturation of the current customs union shared by the three nations, and will allow further economic integration -- increased free movement of goods, streamlined trade regulation, unified macroeconomic policy -- between member states. And the EEU has potential to keep growing. If Putin somehow manages to woo the remaining post-Soviet (non-Baltic) nations, the EEU's market could jump to some 300 million members and just under $4 trillion in combined GDP.

But that swell is far from plausible.

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