The group's attempts to be more than a talk shop have often only fostered more discord. Its peacekeepers have been accused of destabilizing conflict zones in the former Soviet Union, and its election monitors -- deployed to provide a counterbalance to Western-dominated observer missions from such groups as the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe -- have consistently given high marks to blatantly fraudulent ballots. Pavel Borodin, secretary of the Russia-Belarus union, said the CIS would have to radically change its focus to survive -- but survive it would.
"The CIS will be reborn as a purely economic organization," he said. "This is a market of 300 million consumers. There's nowhere else to turn."
Putin made much the same point to German journalists this week, singling out the shared energy system, transport network and other infrastructure dating back to Soviet times as strong incentives to deepen economic cooperation.
"These are all natural advantages that the past has give us," Putin said. "Not to use this, I think, would be simply stupid."
Yet the plans to remove trade barriers between member states that have dominated the CIS agenda since its creation have never gotten off the ground. Attempts at forging closer economic ties have been hampered by the stark differences between the sizes of the member economies and their levels of development, as well as fears of Russian domination.
"The CIS is a system that has completed all of its set tasks, and there is no hope for its development," Ukrainian Economic Minister Sergei Teryokhin said.
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