Putin related content 

Circassians are picking up the lance relinquished by those successful Don Quixotes, the Balts. The US has a lot on its plate right now. But I have just come back from a few...

The EU was right to offer incentives to Lukashenka, but now that has to change. Alyaksandr Lukashenka's crackdown on political opponents following December's presidential...

Our menus carry plenty of ‘geographical indicators', but what would a politicised east European menu look like? “What's ‘Cutlet Carpathian-style?',” your columnist...

The Georgia crisis suggests the EU and NATO should ease the conditions of accession for Georgia. As NATO and the European Union formulate their longer-term responses to...

Stuck for reading matter? There's still a chance to grab some new and old central and eastern European classics. If readers of this column are anything like its author, they...

The Cold War provides an example of how we can address the deep insecurity highlighted by the conflict in Georgia. The Georgian crisis has escalated beyond the...

Russia needs the European Union far more than the EU realises. Dmitry Medvedev's first EU-Russia summit as Russian president should not be an occasion for European leaders...

Some still call this place Nizza, which could loosely be translated as “an Italian city that works”. They don't have many of them left in Berlusconiland proper. It...

Whatever passes for the current Russian establishment – be it the elite of the security services, Putin-faithful politicians or his close circle and loyal oligarchs –...

Energy firms in central Europe are doing business with Gazprom, whether or not they – or their governments – like it, writes Lorraine Mallinder. Around two years ago,...

“If human cloning were better developed, President Putin would probably run for both president and prime minister, following the Kaczynskis' example in Poland.”Graham...

There are few policy issues as divisive within the EU as relations with Russia. Eight years ago, the EU agreed a common strategy towards Russia. Four years ago, it agreed...

When people like this complain, you take notice. Vladimir Bukovsky spent 12 years in Soviet prison camps before being deported in 1976. Oleg Gordievsky was Britain's top KGB...

Members of the European Parliament and the European Commission have cleared the way to start the drafting of a new treaty which is expected to be agreed by the end of...

Heroes are rare, and the greatest I ever saw, Boris Yeltsin, has just passed away. Heroes are outsized personalities who are not always easy to appreciate. Yeltsin stormed...

In 1984 I took a train from Braunschweig in what was then West Germany to Berlin. The train was run by the British armed forces and was sealed. The doors were locked and...

The Polish have a ghastly history as Europe's battlefield. Over the centuries the population has had a choice of viewing: oppression and exploitation from the east or the...

Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy chief, is due in Moscow in the coming weeks to discuss his proposal that EU peacekeepers should be deployed in Abkhazia and South...

I fully support the comments made by Kevin Roth, the director of Human Rights Watch, quoted in ‘EU punches well below its weight' (14-20 December 2006), about the EU's lack...

Why should anyone care about the Kazaks? Or should that be Kazakhs? It is hard to get excited about a country that can't decide even how to spell its own name. So please...