On Jan. 1, one of Vladimir Putin’s most ambitious foreign-policy projects and a longtime Kremlin dream became a reality. Unfortunately for Putin and his colleagues in Moscow, nothing about the plan will work.
The Eurasian Economic Union — a post-Soviet economic bloc of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia — was designed to allow the Kremlin to reassert influence in its backyard and counterbalance the Brussels-based, 28-member-state European Union, which has inched towards Russia’s borders over the past decade. Instead, the Kremlin’s prestige project, announced in 2011, but floated as an idea since 1994, limped out of the start gate in 2015.
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