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.

Guest Contributors: Timothy Stafford and Laura Dzelzyte 18th March 2014 After more than a decade promoting nonintervention in the internal affairs of other countries, Russia has become the latest convert to the concept of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’, or R2P. The notion, ...

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.

The EU somehow managed to cover up its failure in Libya and Mali, but the disaster of its Syria policy cannot be squashed as easily. The time has come for the member states to ask themselves how far they want to go in terms of a common foreign and security policy.

Senior Fellow John Slinger published in The Spectator on Russia and the United States’ diplomatic agreement on the international control and subsequent destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons. Amidst the hopefulness and optimism, the answers to this question prove disturbing. We must remember that it might take a disaster even worse than 100,000 dead and the use of WMDs against civilians

The RAF interception of Syrian Jets over Cyprus is a sign that Britain can still be sucked into Syrian intervention through regional spill over and unforeseen events.

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