... Russia succeeds in Ukraine, it would be somewhat naive to expect our adversaries to change their views on the world, since it is tantamount to demanding a change in their philosophy of life.
Russia has traditionally had a difficult relationship with the Western international order based on power. From the moment of the first contacts between the Russian state and Europe at the end of the 15th century, our neighbours reasonably came to the conclusion formulated by the ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund von Herberstein: Russia is very large and very different from Europe. From that moment on, Russia ...
... new rapprochement is desirable and apparently possible.
The Ukraine and other similar crises should in the long term be addressed on the basis of agreed permanent neutrality and merger in new formats of cooperation and security. In the first place, Eurasian.In view of the new realities, above all, China’s movement westward, the stake should be put on replacing Russia’s failed unilateral European geopolitical integration by Eurasian one, by transition from the aborted Greater Europe project towards Greater Eurasia or, in the long term, even towards a Community ...
... various Russian NGOs, I wholeheartedly support this proposal. At the same time, my personal experience tells me that quite often the Western approach to the Russian civil society is similar to the Brussels acquis communautaire approach in dealing with EU partners. The West decides who can and who cannot represent Russian civil society as well as how to grade Russian NGOs according to the focus of their activities, methods, and sources of their funding. This approach has never been productive in the past, and there ...
... do anything other than support. Moscow, on the other hand, is fixated on the elites it can control – and is therefore bound to resist the change. Furthermore, it would interpret any difficulties with the societies as subversion originating in Europe. That way, even if the West did concede Russia a sphere of influence, it would never reap the desired benefits in terms of stability – but it would have lost the OSCE-based principles of the European order.
Finally, the third option – a combination of firmness and ...
Russia and the European Union (EU) are currently engaged in a geopolitical struggle for control of the post-Soviet space. While Russia is the current regional hegemon, the European Union and NATO have been trying to gain influence in what Russia refers to as its “near ...