On May 13-15, 2016 Tallinn hosted the 10
th
Anniversary
Lennart Meri Conference
(LMC), an annual commemorative event for the late President of Estonia (1992-2001). In ten years, the Conference has become one of the most representative European forums for discussing development and security issues of the continent.
This year’s LMC entitled “Shaping the New Normal” focused on the impact of the Ukrainian factor, migration crisis, rise of populism, acute financial problems ...
... the auspices of the Government of Montenegro, took place in Budva, Montenegro, on May 5-7, 2016. The Forum is one of the major international platforms for discussing the most important dilemmas in the field of security in the Balkans and South East Europe (SEE), as well as in Europe as a whole.
This year, the main focus of the discussions was on the issues of combating terrorism, political radicalism, and of managing migration flows in and around Europe. Particular attention was paid to the possible ...
On February 9, 2016, the Russian International Affairs Council in partnership with the Delegation of the European Union to the Russian Federation hosted a Roundtable “
EU and Russia: Our Differences, Interconnections and the Way Forward
,” attended by many leading experts from Russia and the EU countries. The reasons for the profound crisis in ...
... Report
The ongoing confrontation between Russia and the west has been characterised by competing narratives concerning the origins and development of events. These differing interpretations make coming to any kind of consensus on the future of the European security order extremely difficult.
Prominent European and Russian experts were brought together by the European Leadership Network and the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) to examine these narratives, their origins in international ...
Policy Brief #2
The EU has suffered a series of crises over the past few years, leading many experts to continually predict the downfall of Europe. The Eurozone crisis uncovered a number of economic issues that need to be dealt with in order to improve the overall competitiveness of the EU economy.
In recent years, the number of academic studies and political opinions on the desired future ...
... problem of the Russian foreign policy is not about how to cope with the external reality, but rather how to define it. It this brief paper, I try to outline some of the most significant manifestations of this problem in Russia’s policy toward the European Union, the seven common phantoms of the Russian thinking. These phantoms were not the only reason why the ambitions concept of Greater Europe stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok was never put into practice, but they definitely contributed to ...
... for interacting with Moscow.
The report insists on the need to approach Russia simultaneously along the tracks of containment and dialogue, with economic and force-based containment needed to make the Kremlin duly honor the opinions of Paris and other European capitals. At the same time, the isolation of Russia cannot be driven to the cutoff point, since otherwise no solutions could be found for acute problems and the climate would only worsen.
In fact, the combination of containment
cum
dialogue ...
The European Union is sometimes referred to as ‘an economic giant and a political dwarf’. This somewhat condescending definition implies that EU member states have always been reluctant to invest significant resources and energy into a common ...
... the West not to abandon Kiev in the face of the Russian Mordor. I got the impression that Ukrainian President’s English had improved greatly over the past year, but he had not changed the old “heroic” image of the champion of “European values”. Mikhail Saakashvili, who had visibly put on weight, was spotted again and again in the company of important Western politicians. However, the Ukrainians failed to generate anything like the former emotional pitch of discussions ...
The
52
nd
Munich Security Conference
, which is the major and most representative global forum for the discussion of security policy, was held in Munich on February 12 to 14.
The conference was attended by more than twenty heads of state and government, dozens of ministers of foreign affairs and of defense, as well as by hundreds of leading politicians, diplomats and experts.
The Russian International Affairs Council was represented by Sergei Lavrov, its Chairman of the Board of Trustees and Russian...
