CIS integration should not be compared to re-Sovietization: Kremlin spokesman

YEREVAN, December 19 / ARKA /. Russian President’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov said recent remarks by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about ‘re-Sovietizing the CIS countries points to a total lack of understanding about the processes taking place in the region,’ RIA Novosti reported.

The US Secretary of State explained efforts to promote greater integration in the CIS as “a move to re-Sovietize the region.”

“It's not going to be called that,” Clinton remarked. "It's going to be called a customs union; it will be called the Eurasian Union and all of that. But let's make no mistake about it. We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow it down or prevent it."

Dmitry Peskov, spokesperson to President Putin, said Clinton’s comments betray a lack of understanding of the “the natural processes that are maturing throughout the former Soviet Union.”

To associate these open developments with some sort of “Sovietization” fails to appreciate the changes taking place in the former Soviet Union,” he said in an interview with the Russia 24 TV channel.

He said Clinton overlooked the basic differences between what passed for integration in the Soviet period compared with today. Most importantly, 

perhaps, is that any integration that occurs in the post-Soviet space today is open and democratic first and foremost. No country is coerced to integrate into the various regional alliances. Peskov reminded the US Secretary of State that integration is an unavoidable fact of these modern days.

"In the world today, given the frequency of global economic upheavals, the unpredictability in the world economy, the impossibility of making even mid-term forecasts, in a world where the smell of crisis is everywhere, the only viable tendency is the tendency to integration, the integration processes," Putin’s spokesperson said.-0-