This is a

a series of the world. I'm John Bachelor.

A Katerina Zolotova, Geopolitical futures, she's in Moscow and we're looking at the Commonwealth of Independent States, often referred

to by the acronym CIS.

At Katerina, a very good day to you, we need to introduce all of this to an audience that here's

much now and again about the European Union or NATO, but CIS is a significant part of the Eurasian supercontinent.

What is it, what was its original idea before we come to how it's doing now?

Good evening to you.

Good evening to you.

Good evening. Well, the CIS is the first, yes, we can say that it is the first

organization that appeared after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

So when the Soviet Union collapsed, all the New Republics didn't get what they're going to do

in the future.

It was a moment of crisis, economic crisis, the crisis of the ideas. And there was a new idea to create some

organization that could replace, well let I say not replace, but could unite all of these newly independent countries together.

At first, Belarus, Russia and Ukraine decided to create such organization.

Later, the former republics joined this organization.

And this organization was existing in different forms.

Mostly it was organization kind of forum where the members of the countries

gathered together, discuss different issues and so on. There were several economic sector, for example,

in the economic sector, for example, later in the

2011, the country signed the free trade zone agreement.

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