... Vladimir Putin came to power. They existed long before. But for the longest time, all of us – East and West – tried to smooth them out, tune them down, or even ignore them completely.
The West has always seen the construction of Greater Europe as the expansion of existing western institutions towards the East. That’s why negotiations on Russia–EU cooperation had little to do with finding reasonable compromises. Rather, they were little more than Europe attempting to force Russia to adopt the “rules of the game”. Russia had to play by Europe’s rules, because these ...
... Institute of International Affairs, Reinhard Krumm of
Friedrich Ebert Foundation
, and Lukasz Kulesa of European Leadership Network.
The discussants came to a conclusion that the Ukraine situation has generated a massive crisis of confidence between Russia and the West, unseen in scale since the Cold War. As a result, Europe is divided into two camps eager to erect varied barriers to fence off from each other.
However, it seems erroneous to insist that the Russia-West freeze has grown directly out of the Ukraine crisis because the two sides had been definitely working ...
... Viktor Yanukovych.
Moreover, the political radicalization in Ukraine has led to an unprecedented rise of radical nationalism in Russia, Europe, and elsewhere. The rise of political radicalism, it turns out, is a real threat not only to the modernizing Arab states, but also to the mature democracies of the West.
Hence, lesson number six is that the potential for political radicalism in developed countries must never be underestimated; ...
