Today an informal summit of CIS leaders and a summit of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) is to be held in the capital of Russia. Aliaksandr Lukashenka flew to Moscow the night before, soon after the negotiations with Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbaev who was on an official visit to Belarus on May 12-14, 2012.
The CSTO summit is devoted to the 20-year anniversary of the signing of the treaty and the 10-year anniversary of the creation of the organization. The Kremlin press service said all the leaders from the CSTO countries will be present: Uzbekistan, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan. The Russian president and the Kazakh CSTO Head are expected to make statements to the press.
The informal summit of CIS leaders is due to start after the CSTO meeting ends. The Kremlin press service said the CIS meeting would have “no fixed agenda” but added “much attention will be given to the deepening of economic integration on the commonwealth space.”
The participants of the CSTO meeting will talk military and technological cooperation and discuss the efforts to coordinate the foreign policy of the regional security organization’s member states.
“There will be a hard talk at the CIS summit,” Innokentiy Adyasov, a member of the expert board under the CIS Committee, said in the interview to RIA Novosti. “The summit is held straight after Vladimir Putin’s inauguration ceremony. It means that the summit will be the first foreigh-policy action of the new-former president of Russia.”
“It is an open secret that personal relationships between Vladimir Putin and Aliaksandr Lukashenka have often been somewhat clouded. And now Aliaksandr Ryhoravich [Lukashenka’s patronymic – Belsat] are constantly stressing that he he is not going to cave in to the Russian leader,” Adyasov added.
Belsat
