To get a sense of why the world this month welcomed the Eurasian Economic Union with such resounding silence, look back to late August. As his country began its ongoing march into economic crumble, Russian President Vladimir Putin fielded a question at the Seliger Youth Camp. A young woman wanted the president’s thoughts on the geopolitical turbulence surrounding Russia—not from the Russia-backed separatists scorching eastern Ukraine, but from apparently ignorant Kazakhs to the south. Noting that the Kazakhs were not “correctly understanding Russian political rhetoric” and that Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev was the most important “restraining factor” keeping ostensible Kazakh nationalism at bay, the woman asked Putin if she and her compatriots could expect “a Ukrainian scenario if Nazarbayev leaves the post of president.”

Putin answered her question, in a way. He didn’t deny the claim of a surge of anti-Russian sentiment in Kazakhstan, rhetoric redolent of Russia’s rationale for invading Ukraine. Rather, he offered an unprompted observation—a sort of geopolitical chauvinism dressed in impartial opinion. Prior to 1991, the president said, “Kazakhs had never had statehood.”

The response out of Kazakhstan didn’t take long. Nazarbayev—an aging autocrat, the only president independent Kazakhstan has ever known—promptly announced that Kazakhstan would spend 2015 celebrating the 550th anniversary of Kazakh statehood, harking back to the founding of the original Kazakh Khanate. (Not quite the 24th birthday Putin had posited.) After watching Russia bludgeon Ukraine under the faulty auspices of protecting those who spoke Russian, and after watching Moscow outright annex territory its leadership considered lost land, Kazakhstan has begun showing signs of defiance. Concomitantly, its relations with Russia have soured more drastically than any time since the fall of the USSR.

This tailspin is but one reason the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), officially unveiled at the beginning of January, arrived with a hush exceeded only by disappointment and intra-union strain. Founded by a trio of strongmen known more for hyper-masculine tendencies than any willingness to cooperate, the EEU has proven heavy on tension and testosterone, light on achievement. Instead of fostering post-Soviet integration, Putin attempted to use the EEU to formalize Russian hegemony. And instead of any of the neo-imperial success he’d imagined, Putin has found only forced smiles, gutted treaties, and empty tables hosting autocrats who make it clear they’d rather be anywhere else.

When Nazarbayev first proposed the Eurasian Union in 1994, the president envisioned a marriage of equals—more European Union, less Soviet (Re-)Union. Putin picked up the idea, and formalized his dream of a Eurasian Union in a 2011 op-ed. Growing out of a Customs Union between Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia, the Eurasian Union was going to return Moscow to the great power stature it enjoyed before the USSR’s collapse. This would be Putin’s grand foreign policy project, surpassing anything he’d yet attempted. The Eurasian Union, he staked, was going to be a new geopolitical “pole.” Its unveiling would herald a new “epoch.” Neither West nor East, but a Eurasian third way.