“To be a Eurasianist should be cool, it should be stylish.”
“Cool” is not the first word you would use to describe the scene. I am in a small conference room in Minsk, at the Belarus office of a Russian government agency called “Rossotrudnichestvo.” Linked to the Foreign Ministry, you could translate it as the “Russian Cooperation Agency,” and some describe it as the soft-power arm of the Kremlin. The crowd, divided roughly evenly between Russians and Belarusians, is a wonky-looking mix of rumpled middle-aged academics and eager students.
The advocate for Eurasian cool is Yuri Kofner, a fresh-faced 20-something from Moscow. The topic is how to make the Eurasian Union more popular in Belarus. It is one of the five member states of the supranational body launched by Russia in 2014 with great fanfare. Since then, depending on your perspective, it is either becoming a Russia-centered counterweight to Western groupings like the European Union, or drifting into irrelevance,
