They're in an economic union, but BR (Belorus) has had cold feet since the beginning. They're in no position to come up to EU standards in manufacturing and business, and their political system outrages even the "uberfascists" in the EU.
Lukashenka (I use the BR spelling just to irritate any of his folk) doesn't like being manipulated and used. So when Crimea went Russia, he didn't recognize it. Same for Donbas. It made Russian transport of military supplies and soldiers through BR to threaten U's northern border a bit harder.
You have to remember part of the language politics from the '90s and '00s. BR was set up as an ethnostate just after WWI. One primary determinant of ethnicity was language. Where the borders were drawn mirrored, to a very great extent, where BR v R were spoken. Only *then* did it become part of the USSR. It had independent voting rights in the League of Nations and so when the UN was formed it retained its voting rights (along with U). Yes, it meant the USSR had 3 UN votes in the General Assembly.
Under the much ballyhooed language policy of the USSR, where every ethnicity and language had rights and its own support, and each constituent republic had its own national language, Russian spread as the only real language for government and education. That "right", like every other in the USSR, was there to disguise what was going on and could easily be made to mean the opposite of what the text said. So in the '90s and '00s, BR linguistic advocates said that they needed to make BR a *real* official language, not one that native BR speakers heard in elementary school when being taught BR but every other class was Russian-only. When they tried to pass a law, there was enough Russian disinformation that Russian would be banned and police would rush in to arrest you if you spoke Russian while having sex in private that it was a political earthquake. When what happened in U happened, BR learned its lesson--and Lukashenka remains terrorized. They've had minimum linguistic support for BR. Belorusian is listed as "endangered". Lukashenka couldn't even make the use of BR normative in his own government.
When Putin said "You're Russian if you speak Russian" to some extent he was channeling many in the West, but he was really talking to all the former constituent Soviet republics where Russian made great inroads. Sometimes by resettlement, sometimes because of the "liberal" language policy that really forced educated workers or those with political ambitions to use Russian.
BFFs? More like battered spouse.
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