2. Economic and Social Ties

We start with an overview of EAEU member states’ economies: Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Russia. We highlight a number of structural features (such as Russia’s dominance in the EAEU in terms of its GDP, population, and role as an exporter of raw materials) that represent challenges for the EAEU’s long-term development as a regional integration project. We describe the high density of economic ties within the post-Soviet space (including railways, electric power, and supply chains) and consider it as an underlying reason for integration. We give special attention to the levels of convergence among EAEU member states’ economies. A long paragraph describes the intricacies and dynamics of public perception of Eurasian integration in all EAEU states and other post-Soviet states (i.e., what people think of integration and how their thinking changed over time).