Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 3 – Ukraine’s exit
from the Commonwealth of Independent States underscores that that organization
did not serve as an organizer of “a civilized divorce” of the former Soviet
republics, as many described it in the early 1990s, or as the framework for “a
new imperial state” as others alternatively hoped or feared, according to
Vitaly Portnikov.
“Today,” the Ukrainian commentator
says, “one can with complete certainty say that the CIS disappointed both the
one and the other.” The CIS has not
revolved conflicts in the region or done anything either to limit Moscow’s
assertion of power or to advance that power in the former Soviet space (ru.krymr.com/a/29206068.html).
There is thus no
reason for Ukraine or any of the other countries originally in that organization
to remain there, Portnikov continues. “Nothing
has come of its plans to deceive its former close neighbors and draw them into
a new union state under the leadership of the Russian president.”
“Over the last 27 years, Russia has
been transformed from a metropolitan center into the main hearth of destabilizing
the situation on the territory of the former USSR. And you can’t build an empire
on instability,” the analyst points out.
As a result, “the CIS did not become
either an instrument of divorce or an instrument of integration. It became a
vacant space. Even as a club of presidents, into which the organization degenerated
at the end of the 1990s, could not take any real decisions: its permanent participants
became authoritarian rulers who represented ineffective and rapidly degrading
state systems.”
“And any step toward reform and
change thus became a step toward departure from the CIS. That was what happened
with Georgia in the past; that is what is now happening with Ukraine; and that
is what could happen with Armenia – indeed, with everyone else as well at some
point.”
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