Minsk will host a session of the Council of CIS Prime Ministers today to discuss 23 document projects. They include documents on development of economic, financial and humanitarian relations.
The prime ministers of the Commonwealth of Independent States will gather after signing the Eurasian Economic Union Treaty. The leaders of Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus signed the document yesterday. They will form the new integration format on January 1, 2015, and guarantee free trade of products, services, capital and labour forces on their territories. CIS Executive Secretary Sergey Lebedev believes that the CIS has become the basis for the Eurasian Economic Union: "Close and fruitful collaboration in the economic field within the framework of the CIS has gradually persuaded certain members of the Commonwealth to intensify cooperation and sign this important document. This is why consider this step to be a closer form of integration. If everything goes well, we will be able to take the positive elements of the CIS that were formed and realized in the Eurasian Economic Union. If practice outlines benefits from the Eurasian Economic Union, we will have no need to convince anyone to integrate more closely."
According to Alexander Gusev, the head of the Center for Strategic Development of the CIS at the RAS Institute of Europe, "there is no such organization in post-Soviet space that could unite so many countries. The CIS consists of 11 countries. It is certainly important for Russia and other Commonwealth states to have a platform they could cooperate on in the political and the economic fields. Today the CIS offers quite a serious positive, constructive platform in the humanitarian field.12 out of the 23 agreements that will be signed at the session of heads of governments will belong to the humanitarian sector."
Gusev believes that it is too early to bury the CIS. "There were several attempts to bury it, but the organization stays. it works and I assume it will be even more successful, regardless of how other major economic and political platforms function. The CIS was created as an organization to collect fragments. We have been collecting the fragments for the last 23 years after the collapse of the USSR. The CIS allowed us to solve a set of problems, and formation of the Eurasian Economic Union is carried out based on existing agreements within the framework of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Yes, they have become outdated. Yes, they may indeed be out of format today. Yes, we need to go on. No one forbids us from doing that. But the CIS platform should be used and it is used.
