Russia and Eurasia

A balanced assessment of the Ukrainian-Russian conflict is a rather challenging task for policy-makers. This is in large part because the views and data collected from both sides comes under the influence of two opposing public discourses. On the one hand, Russia is perceived as the aggressor breaking the territorial integrity of Ukraine.

HIC Interview with Linda Eichler, Vice President of the YEPP ... Here, we present to you our interview with Linda Eicheler currently running as a candidate for the European Parliament. She is the youngest candidate on the list of Pro Patria and Res Publica Union (IRL), the leading conservative party in Estonia.

The crisis in Ukraine originated in President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to abandon a far-reaching Association Agreement with the European Union in November 2013. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets and protests stretched over several months, culminating in an eruption of violence in February 2014.

As reports emerge of a growing sense of unease in Moldova and the Baltic States, the HIC thinks it is critical that we ask what recent events in Crimea signal for the eastern frontiers of Europe as a whole. Here, we present to you our interview with Colm Lauder, currently the Secretary General of Europe's largest political youth organisation, the Youth of the European People's Party (YEPP).

As declared by Russia Today, Russian troops were deployed to Crimea ‘only to protect human rights’. The Crimean issue unfolding at present was compared to the secession of Kosovo, and daring to deny the illusory similarities between these two wildly different conflicts is described as ‘rewriting the rulebook’ on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine.

Last Thursday I took the metro to Belorusskaya, to get the Sheremetyevo airport train out of Moscow. Perhaps not for the last time in my life but probably the last for a while, at least. During the last six months I have met, befriended and drunk too much vodka with some warm, sensible and decent Russian people.

I may have read this wrong, but I have an increasing sense of foreboding that the long-running “Euromaidan” occupation in Kyiv is not going to end well. Yes, Yanukovych has agreed to come to the negotiating table - he has even offered a prime ministerial job to one of the opposition leaders - but I suspect that this is merely playing for time. He has not offered the job to his most capable rival, Klitschko, and his word is not exactly his bond.

Moscow, I have recently discovered, has a decent daily English-language newspaper, the Moscow Times. While its attitude to the Putin government tends to be a fairly balanced criticism rather than either cosying up it or vitriol against it, neither is it afraid to criticise, unlike a seemingly increasing number of other Russian media outlets.

Since the end of the Cold War, Russia’s influence in the Middle East has been greatly undermined and its policy has changed in emphasis and intensity. While during the clash between the two superpowers – the US and the Soviet Union – the Middle East was part of its ideological battlefield