Section: European Voice (EU)
Polish nonprofit tries building startup ecosystem
WARSAW — Poland is better known for its vodka than its high-tech startups, but one nonprofit here with backing from Israel is trying to create the next ecosystem for ideas. Since Poland joined the European Union in 2004, an estimated 2 million-plus Poles have left for the higher salaries and better living standards in the West. Not all of them...
The hotline to Moscow goes cold
Deep inside the Pentagon, in the National Military Command Center, is the so-called red phone that has connected the U.S. and Russian high commands since after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. First a teletype, then a fax, and now a secure email and chat link, the emergency hotline was designed to prevent nuclear Armageddon. It is still tested...
Hopes for truce in Ukraine pushed to 2016
PARIS — French President François Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Friday that their efforts to broker a truce in Ukraine were back on track but would take longer than originally planned and run into 2016. After six hours of talks at the Elysée palace with Ukraine’s president Petro Poroshenko and Russian President Vladimir...
POLITICO Playbook Plus: VW bugged — Schulz succession — Farage flushed
Right, what the reunification show will look like… if it works. NEIN DANKE: The German government breathed a collective sigh of relief that it failed in its attempts to get Volkswagen to sponsor a Brussels event commemorating the 25th Anniversary of the German Reunification. The country’s permanent representative to the EU, Reinhard...
What is Putin really up to in Syria?
Vladimir Putin kicked this week off with a speech at the United Nations calling the West’s refusal to back SyrianPresident Bashar al-Assad an “enormous mistake.” Days later, when Russian bombs began to drop on targets within Syria, many analysts warned that Putin was making a sizable mistake himself by inserting Russia into the middle of...
Hollande unchained
PARIS — Before he became France’s president in 2012, François Hollande’s only foreign experience had been a drive from New York to California at age 20 while researching a report on U.S. fast food and, a few years later, an eight-month internship at the French embassy in Algiers. That’s some distance from holding France’s...
The real story behind Putin’s Syria strikes
The roots of Russia’s bold intervention in Syria — which began in earnest on Wednesday with airstrikes against opponents of President Bashar al-Assad’s government near the city of Homs — extend to the beginning of the Arab Spring in early 2011, when Vladimir Putin served as prime minister nominally under his protégé and hand-picked...
An open letter to the European media
Dear editors, We recognize, don’t we, that Europe — the countries of Europe, the European Union as an entity, the very idea of Europe — is facing the worst collective threats in living memory? These crises — of economics, of public finances, of migration and refugee flows, of the multiple security threats around our borders and even inside...
Putin blindsides Obama
On Monday afternoon, President Barack Obama grudgingly sat down with Vladimir Putin in part to gain a clearer understanding of the Russian leader’s opaque plans for Syria. Less than 48 hours later, Putin unpleasantly surprised Obama with new clarity: airstrikes that are scrambling the U.S. president’s plans for Syria and escalating...
Merkel’s new normal
BERLIN — Did Angela Merkel’s chancellorship just reach its tipping point? A few weeks ago, such a question would have prompted quizzical stares, if not outright opprobrium. Until recently, Merkel, who this fall marks her 10th anniversary as chancellor, appeared to be at the height of her power. Even when confronted with thorny political...
