Russia WTO

IT HAD become almost a ritual. Every year Russian officials promised that by the end of the following year their country would complete the negotiations to join the World Trade Organisation. Every year the timetable slipped by another year. But now Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, has broken with the ritual by announcing that, after 16 years of trying to get in, Russia no longer wants to join the WTO on its own but only as part of a customs union that it has forged with Belarus and Kazakhstan.