By Georgiy Voloshin (11/2/2011 issue of the CACI Analyst)

Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev was the last of the three presidents of the Customs Union member states – Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus – to react to Vladimir Putin’s recent article, published in one of Russia’s most read newspapers, about the prospects of creating a full-blown economic entity modeled after the European Union.

In his in-depth review of the economic integration among what in late 1991 became the Commonwealth of Independent States and later within the framework of the Eurasian Economic Community, Nazarbayev described the far-reaching goals of multilateral cooperation between former Soviet countries, with full respect for their national sovereignty and identity.

He also warned against any attempts to depict the ongoing process of “rapprochement” between Moscow, Minsk, and Astana, with the possible inclusion of other capitals, as a revival of the Soviet Union.

By Haroutiun Khachatrian (11/2/2011 issue of the CACI Analyst)

The return of Armenia’s second President Robert Kocharyan to national politics is unlikely to affect the parliamentary elections in May 2012, since Kocharyan is officially a non-partisan and does not enjoy the support of any political party. However, the question of Kocharyan’s potential return to politics has attracted significant attention in the Armenian press in the context of pre-election developments in Russia. When the decision that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will most likely replace Dmitry Medvedev as Russian President was announced on September 24, many Armenian media outlets argued that a similar arrangement is possible in Armenia, due to the country’s close ties with Russia.

By Georgiy Voloshin (10/19/2011 issue of the CACI Analyst)

On October 13, Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev signed into law a new bill regulating the activities of religious organizations, both domestic and international. This law, whose adoption by the Parliament’s lower and upper chambers took only a few weeks, has quickly become a source of serious controversy, with its detractors constantly referring to the discriminatory effect of its several clauses, in a country with a multitude of religious confessions.

The most controversial provision of the newly adopted law is contained in Article 7, which states that public authorities and state-run organizations should no longer be open to any kind of religious rituals, for example including Muslim prayers, still practiced even by some high-ranking officials.