On April 2, 1996, Boris Yeltsin and Alexander Lukashenko signed the treaty establishing the Community of Russia and Belarus. Later, in 1999, the Union State treaty followed, envisioning a common currency, supranational bodies, unified economic rules, and even its own state symbols.
Yet over three decades, most of those plans have remained unrealized. Even the abolition of roaming charges, presented by state media as an achievement, turned out to be only a partial arrangement with free short-term packages and extra charges beyond the limit. In December 2025, Union State Secretary Sergey Glazyev acknowledged that the issue of identity verification had still not been fully resolved.
Symbolic integration has also stalled. The Union State still has no approved flag, coat of arms, or anthem, and the parliament envisioned by the treaty has never appeared. Formally, the two sides continue to speak of equality, but in practice the gap in economic weight and population between Russia and Belarus makes the distribution of powers extremely difficult.
Political fears in Moscow were another major obstacle. In the 1990s, parts of the Russian elite worried that Lukashenko might try to secure a leading role in a merged state. Later, disputes shifted to accelerated integration road maps and the idea of a single emission center, but those plans were also postponed.
After the suppression of the 2020 protests and on the eve of the war against Ukraine, integration moved toward security and political control. Moscow and Minsk started aligning their repressive mechanisms, discussed a joint extremist registry, and introduced mutual enforcement of court rulings; the agreement was ratified on March 23.
But even here, full merger has not happened: the unified travel-ban database worked inconsistently, and the common extremist list discussed since 2024 was never completed. In the end, the Union State’s clearest result has been not a shared political structure, but the gradual convergence of two authoritarian systems.