EU officials report that the aim of the initiative is to help stabilize and modernize the states created from the break-up of the former Soviet Union by bringing in free markets and pro-democracy reforms.

The Russia-Georgia war that happened last August over the breakaway province of the Southern Ossetia further underscored the EU necessity to "engage more deeply with its eastern neighbors to stabilize the region," admits Sabine Fischer, a Russia and CIS expert at the EU Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) in Paris. 
Then there is Belarus, lately called Belorussia, which the EU has long regarded as the black sheep of the post-Soviet CIS states. Its current president Alexander Lukashenko, who has the reputation of being "Europe`s last dictator" for his government dubious human rights record, had even been placed under an EU travel ban, which was decreased last October.

But now that Lukaschenko has noted he wishes to normalize "hard" relations with the EU, Belarus has been invited to participate in the Prague summit on a technical level.

The Eastern Partnership, which would be embedded in an existing structure called the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), emerged last year as the brainchild of Poland and Sweden.

ENP was founded in 2004 when the EU expanded to the East to include the former Soviet satellite states in the bloc, whose membership jumped from 15 to 25. Romania and Bulgaria later have joined the EU in 2007.

Its initial goal was to minimize the influence of a new Iron Curtain between the enlarged EU and the neighboring post-Soviet states even further east, by proposing a privileged partnership based on a commitment to democratic values and market principles.

The Eastern Partnership builds up a stronger regional dimension that reaches further than the ENP, reports Oksana Antonenko, a senior Russia analyst at the World Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

ENP provides bilateral relations with all countries that border the entire EU by land and sea, including the Mediterranean Union countries, whereas the EP is a multilateral agreement that involves only six countries, she mentioned.

"The EP opens the door to potentially deeper quick integration with the EU on matters such as visa-free travel or free trade," admitted Antonenko, who explained that member states could keep progressing to a higher level of cooperation with the EU  "a la carte" on a specific issue.