Section: The Economist (The United Kingdom)
Just visiting
VLADIMIR PUTIN, Russia’s president, rarely visits the European Union these days. When he does, it is unclear whether he wishes to mend fences or issue threats. During a visit on July 1st to Finland, which has a 1,340km (883-mile) border with Russia, Mr Putin did both: he made reassurance sound like a threat. Even as NATO was running...
Trip-wire deterrence
Feeling lucky, Putin? A LOT of work goes into preparing for NATO’s biennial summits. So the hope is that next week’s summit in Warsaw is not dominated by Brexit. Nobody will be keener than David Cameron, Britain’s soon-to-be-ex-prime minister, to present a picture of business as usual for the 28-member alliance. And there is...
Small carrot, medium stick
AT last week’s St Petersburg International Economic Forum, Vladimir Putin’s flagship economic conference, a pair of guests raised Russia’s increasingly fervent hopes for a rapprochement with the European Union. Matteo Renzi, Italy’s prime minister, regaled the crowd with references to shared cultural history. The European...
The maid of Kiev
More popular than the president AT THREE o’clock in the morning on May 25th, guards roused Nadia Savchenko in her prison cell in southern Russia, told her to pack her things and whisked her to an airport. “I didn’t know if I was flying to Ukraine or to Siberia,” says the Ukrainian military pilot, who spent nearly two years in Russian...
1944 all over again
A Tatar’s courage never flags ON May 14th Crimea’s indigenous Tatars sat glued to their screens, watching as Jamala, a Ukrainian singer of Tatar descent, won the Eurovision song contest. Jamala’s song “1944” commemorated Stalin’s brutal deportation of the entire Crimean Tatar population. For Russia’s government, the...
Referendumania
JAN HERFKENS, a 25-year-old law student in Amsterdam, did not want to vote in the Netherlands’ recent referendum on the European Union’s trade deal with Ukraine. “We already have one big referendum,” he says, meaning the general election; he would rather elect representatives to handle policy issues than vote on them himself. The...
Soviet apocalypse
“MY MOTHERLAND is the Soviet Union,” reads a sentence written in cursive script in one of the exercise books scattered on the floor of an abandoned school in Pripyat, a Soviet-era ghost town in Ukraine next to the Chernobyl nuclear plant. The town, built for the plant’s workers and their families, was evacuated on the afternoon of April...
Fool me once
IN HER colourless suit, Angela Merkel looked like a grey mouse, too ashamed to face the German public after her cowardly decision to permit investigation into a comedian who had insulted the Turkish president. She is the epitome of hypocrisy and double standards. Her migration policy is an act of political suicide which has empowered...
Quantum of silence
AS ANY fan of action movies knows, the best way to keep a madman from executing a dastardly plan is to keep him talking. The distraction buys time to save the hostage or defuse the bomb. With luck, you might persuade the villain that violence is against his own interests. This, more or less, is the approach adopted by some European countries...
Clean-up crew
IT is easy to despair of Ukraine. The war-torn country has been engulfed by political crisis for nearly two months. The “Revolution of Dignity” that overthrew the corrupt, authoritarian government of President Viktor Yanukovych two years ago brought no revolutionary change. Corruption is still rampant. Key reforms are incomplete. The separation...
