Countering the US-NATO Alliance: Moscow's Eurasian Union Project and Russia's Geostrategic Stability
by Yuri Andreev
January 19, 2012
Strategic Culture Foundation

US top foreign-policy strategist and a die-hard Russophobe Zbigniew Brzeziński had a point when he wrote in The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives that “Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state”, moreover, a one under permanent pressure from Central Asian republics and China. He also stressed quite appropriately therein that “However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as its access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia”.

In other words, Russia can't realistically hope to achieve geostrategic stability unless it manages to entrain Ukraine. As a result, the task of precluding synergies between the two countries occupies a significant line on the US and EU foreign-policy agendas. Russian premier Vladimir Putin's opinion piece published in Izvestia in 2011 - "A new integration project for Eurasia: The future in the making" – where he puts forward a case for building a Eurasian union in the post-Soviet space, simply had to come under fire in the West, as what Putin suggests is an alliance between Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, to which Kazakhstan and other republics of the former Soviet Union would also be welcome.

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