It has the second largest oil reserves among the former Soviet republics after Russia, and its oil exports are expected to soar as its huge Kashagan oil field, in the Caspian Sea, develops.
Estonia is the smallest, least corrupt and most prosperous of all the former Soviet republics.
In recent years, Latvia has reinvented itself as a financial services hub, facilitating capital flight from Russia and other former Soviet republics.
Analysts suspect that one of his chief goals is the expansion of Russian influence in other formerly Soviet republics under the guise of an economic union.
The five central Asian republics have made scant progress towards democratic reform in the two decades since independence.
The 173rd Airborne led war games with soldiers from Ukraine, the UK and several former Soviet republics in Yavoriv in September, but this marks the first long-term training programme.
Monitoring missions from the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which include former Soviet republics and China, called the election open and democratic.
Authorities in Kiev have lost touch with them since the declaration of the independent republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.
This is an alternative political bloc meant to encompass now-independent Soviet republics, with Moscow rather than Brussels as the dominant pole.
There are land borders further north in which migrants are regularly caught trying to get into Slovakia, Romania and the Baltic republics.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is keen to draw other former Soviet republics into the Eurasian union, but Shushkevich says that real economic development would come from liberalisation of the Belarus economy, 80% of which is still in state hands.
