Section: The Economist (The United Kingdom)
The Eurasian Union: The other EU
A Eurasian threesome “IT IS like you’ve been dating a girl for a long time,” grins Pavel Andreev, an editor at a state-controlled broadcaster, Rossiya Segodnya, explaining why it has taken so long to press ahead with the Eurasian Union. “You’ve met the parents, you’ve spent a weekend with the families, and now you want to get...
Ukraine and Russia: Battering on
IN A dusty Russian field close to the border with Ukraine, a fleet of nearly 300 trucks sit under the hot summer sun. Their arrival on August 14th was a sideshow to the war inside Ukraine, a piece of political sleight-of-hand that was neither a true humanitarian mission (as Moscow presented it) nor a prelude to invasion by Russian “peacekeepers”...
Russia and the West: Flexing its mussels
A NEW dish may soon appear in Moscow restaurants: “Belarusian” mussels. So goes a rather Soviet-style joke making the rounds since August 5th, when Russia blocked food imports from countries that have imposed sanctions on it. Seafood from America and Europe is now banned, but can still get into landlocked Belarus, which enjoys a customs-free zone...
Russia’s aid convoy: Putin’s PR coup
HELP is on the way. Or so Russian state television declared on August 12th, as nearly 300 lorries with food, medicine and generators set off from a base outside Moscow for the besieged city of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine.Confusion reigns over what the lorries are carrying, and over how they will cross into Ukraine. As The Economistwent to press,...
Russia and the West: How to lose friends
Proudly alone “ISOLATION”, “consolidation” and “self-reliance” are different terms used among Moscow’s political and business elite to mean the same thing. In the face of international sanctions occasioned by its support of the rebels in eastern Ukraine and its earlier annexation of Crimea, Russia is...
Sanctions on Russia: This is going to hurt
IT MAY not be, as leaders in Washington and Brussels insist, the start of a new cold war. But the punitive sanctions against Russia announced by the European Union and America on July 29th bring to an end a 25-year-long quest to make Moscow a partner of the West. How long the rupture will last and whether it intensifies will depend upon the...
The war in Ukraine: Closing in
THE battle for eastern Ukraine may be entering a decisive phase. Since early July Ukraine’s re-energised armed forces have been on the offensive against 15,000 or so Russian-backed separatists. The Ukrainians are close to achieving two important objectives: surrounding Donetsk, the region’s biggest city, and establishing some control...
Poland’s defence: A front-line state
POLAND spent $4.7 billion on 48 American-built F-16 fighters, but in the event of a conflict with Russia, the safest place for the warplanes would be on a German airfield, quips a defence analyst. Threadbare Soviet-era air defences would be unable to protect Poland against an attack.With neighbouring Ukraine in turmoil, Warsaw is more acutely...
Eastern Ukraine: Fighting on
THE two presidents could not have offered a greater contrast. Announcing new sanctions against Russia on July 16th, America’s Barack Obama read a prepared statement and took no questions. Minutes later, Russia’s Vladimir Putin staged an off-the-cuff press conference in Brazil to assail the sanctions’ legitimacy. He let emotion...
War in Ukraine: The turn of the tide
THE Ukrainian flag flies again over Sloviansk, a former stronghold of eastern Ukraine’s separatists. Succumbing to some punishing shelling, the rebels retreated on July 5th, leaving behind a city blighted with bullet holes and bombed-out buildings. In areas they had vacated, unexploded mortars lay wedged into the asphalt.After ending its...
