EU Riga summit 'not against Russia', Merkel says

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The EU's Eastern Partnership "is not an instrument for pursuing an expansionist EU policy", German Chancellor Angela Merkel said ahead of the summit.

The partnership "is not directed against anyone, it's not against Russia", she said.

But Russia cannot yet rejoin the G7 group of leading nations, she added.

"So long as Russia does not comply with basic common values, a return to the G8 format is not imaginable for us." The G7 - grouping top industrialised nations - meets in Elmau, southern Germany, next month.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32824840

[DonCoquixote]

1. Hey Germany

Guess what, many people in Europe are more afraid of you then they are of Putin, and that is not just because of the swastika, but because you did a lot to undermine the EU. I would advis eyou to make nice with Russia, because if they decide to eat you this time, few will miss you.

[DetlefK]

6. Uhhh, you didn't say that.

First off, I am german.

1. You know why Germany has so big a say in the EU? Money. Whenever there's a major EU-project, like bailing out Greece, every country pays its share. And Germany pays the biggest share. Germany's power in the EU isn't the power of "Yes", it's the power of "No".
Germany isn't leading the EU (which some Germany-haters like and some Germany-haters dislike), it is using the threat of denying its money as a veto-power in the background.


2. Don't worry. Russia won't conquer Germany. Germany is a NATO-member and the US will defend it.
After all, the US needs Germany as an ally in Europe.


3. Yes, Germany had the Nazi-stuff. And we Germans owned up to it, we worked on making things right again. You know how long it took for Germans to consider it okay to be proud of being a German? 2006, the Soccer World Cup hosted in Germany.

Has the US yet apologized for overthrowing democracies during the Cold War and replacing them with bloodthirsty, torture-happy, mass-mudering tyrants? The people of Iran and South-America would like to have some words with you.
When was the time when Americans said "We did horrible things but we made it okay again and we have re-earned the right to be proud of the United States of America again?"
Yes, we Germans did some awful, awful shit. But at least we are sorry for that.


4. People being more afraid of Germany than of Putin?
- There is no censorship in Germany apart from the usual neonazi/communist/anarchist/islamist stuff. Germany has a thriving culture of independent media.
- Opposition-figures in Germany do not fall victim to mysterious assassinations that never get solved.
- No german head-of-state has ever stolen a Superbowl-ring.

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2. Europe should tread carefully

As the European Union’s leaders gather in Riga for a summit with the six members of the EU’s “Eastern Partnership,” many recall the dramatic meeting in Vilnius of November 2013. It was there that Ukraine’s then president, Viktor Yanukovych, under heavy Russian pressure, refused to sign the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement that had been negotiated from 2007 to 2012.

Of course, when Yanukovych returned home, he had to face thousands of protesters in Kiev’s Maidan (Independence Square). Determined to hold him to his promise to sign the EU agreement and not take Ukraine into a customs union with Russia, the protesters mobilized the country. Yanukovych, failing to crush them with his security forces, simply fled. Russia’s behavior in Ukraine since then has made the Eastern Partnership more important than ever.

The Eastern Partnership was launched in 2009 on the initiative of Poland and Sweden, where I was the foreign minister at the time. The aim was to respond to the desire of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine for some of the instruments of integration that had helped transform the Central European and Baltic countries into the democracies — and now EU members — that they are today.

The Eastern Partnership was also seen as a way to balance the EU’s “Russia first” approach. Enormous resources had been invested in the relationship with Russia, but very little had gone into helping the countries in the neighborhood that the EU and Russia share — including the most important of these neighbors, Ukraine.

http://www.arabnews.com/columns/news/749726

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3. German exports to Russia take a tumble

German exports to Russia dropped by a staggering 18 percent in 2014, the National Statistics Office (Destatis) reported Thursday, saying that shipments to that country reached a full-year volume of 29 billion euros ($32.2 billion).

The decline comes on the back of a 6-percent dip in exports a year earlier, highlighting the impact that worsening relations between the West and Russia over the latter's perceived role in the Ukraine conflict is having for the German business community.

At the same time, imports from Russia decreased by 7 percent in 2014 to total 38 billion euros, meaning that last year saw the highest ever annual German trade deficit with Russia.

http://www.dw.de/german-exports-to-russia-take-a-tumble/a-18464606

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4. Ukraine lawmakers suspend military cooperation with Russia

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- Ukraine's parliament on Thursday voted to suspend military cooperation with Russia in a long-anticipated move signaling a further break in relations between the once-close partners.

The five cooperation agreements scrapped by the Verkhovna Rada include one giving the Russian military transit rights to reach Moldova, whose territory is partly controlled by a Moscow-supported separatist government.

Relations between Russia and Ukraine plummeted after the overthrow in February 2014 of Moscow-friendly Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Russia subsequently annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula. Kiev also accuses Moscow of arming and staffing separatist insurgencies in eastern Ukraine.

In turning away from Russia, Ukraine has increasingly reached out for assistance to NATO, an organization the current government hopes the country will eventually join.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_UKRAINE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2015-05-21-04-27-36

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5. Rada withdraws from Convention for Human Rights until Russia ends aggression

The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine has passed a resolution declaring that it has withdrawn from some of the obligations stipulated in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms until Russia cease its armed aggression in eastern Ukraine.

A total of 249 MPs voted in favor of the resolution on Thursday.

According to several deputies, international law permits such a withdrawal in response to the aggression unleashed against Ukraine by Russia.

http://en.interfax.com.ua/news/general/266980.html

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7. The Putin Channel: Kremlin TV Beats EU to Europe’s Russian Speakers

Russian is the European Union’s seventh-most widely spoken language and the lingua franca of former Soviet countries in the EU’s eastern neighborhood. It’s a fact Europeans chose to ignore until last year, when Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea and helped ignite the conflict in eastern Ukraine, saying he was defending the rights of local Russian speakers.

When Crimeans applauded the annexation, it became clear that for years since the collapse of the Communist bloc, the EU has done next to nothing to win the hearts and minds of these Europeans. That has left them available for the increasingly barbed and sophisticated TV propaganda of the Kremlin.

With the largest proportion of the ethnic-Russian population in the EU, the Baltic countries Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia feel especially vulnerable. Twenty-four years after these countries regained independence from the Soviet Union, broadcasts from Moscow remain the prime source of information for Russian speakers there, largely because there is no robust alternative in their preferred language.

Now, with Ukraine still torn by strife and as Latvia hosts a raft of European summits this week in Riga, its capital, the propaganda battle is looking pretty one-sided. On TV in their hotel rooms, the arriving Eurocrats will find Russian channels vastly outnumbering both Latvian and international ones and churning out slick, pricey entertainment studded with fervid anti-Western commentary. The fun fare ranges from Russian franchises of Western shows, such as the U.K.’s Strictly Come Dancing, to homegrown entertainment, quiz shows, crime series, and sitcoms.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-21/the-putin-channel-eu-is-losing-tv-fight-for-mind-share-of-europe-s-russian-speakers

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8. Obama Is Defaming Putin, Complains Harper’s Cover Story

In the Harper’s cover story on the Obama presidency, “What Went Wrong,” David Bromwich recapitulates mostly familiar grounds of left-wing disenchantment with the administration. (It is not available online because Harper’s hates the internet.) Bromwich, though, arrives on creative new ground when he gets around to denouncing Obama’s policy toward Russia, which involves such crimes as “the defamation of Vladimir Putin”:

Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, boasted in December 2013 that the United States had spent $5 billion since 1991 in the attempt to convert Ukraine into a Western asset. The later stages of the enterprise called for the defamation of Vladimir Putin, which went into high gear with the 2014 Sochi Olympics and has not yet abated.

Sadly, Bromwich does not spell out the details of this campaign of defamation, leaving his readers to imagine. Poor Putin, viciously smeared by Obama. His only crime was loving the eastern portion of Ukraine a bit too much, and, perhaps, shirtwear too little.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/05/obama-is-defaming-putin-complains-harpers.html

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9. On Mariupol’s Front Lines With Ukraine’s Mother Courage

MARIUPOL, Ukraine — She is a tall, confident woman with piercing blue eyes and a big smile, and Galina Odnorog has become a celebrity volunteer on Ukraine's front lines outside the threatened city of Mariupol. In the last three months of almost daily shelling, she dug tranches, evacuated civilians from Russian-backed rebel territories, organized street protests of thousands of people against rumored demilitarization of besieged Mariupol and provided soldiers manning artillery positions just about everything they could ask for.

The map of her daily car trips covers the entire front, including mined roads and villages where Mariupol taxi drivers often refuse to go: Novoselovka, Mirnoye, Granitnoye, Ignatevka and especially the constantly
shelled Shyrokyne.

Kiev’s military men trust Odnorog. “She is the one who can make the difference,” Donbas Battalion Commander “Gal” told The Daily Beast, nodding toward Galina in the front seat as we drove. The battalion vehicle was approaching half-destroyed villages where people live in daily fear of new attacks. In these little corners of hell they make less than $100 a month and know they have no option for escape on the day the war comes to their doorstep.

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“Our biggest concern is that the blow might come from within,” she says, cutting to the chase. “Separatists are among us in Mariupol.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/21/on-mariupol-s-front-lines-with-ukraine-s-mother-courage.html

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10. EU seeks to keep partnership with ex-Soviet nations on track

RIGA, Latvia — European Union leaders on Thursday will seek new ways to bolster ties with six post-communist nations in Eastern Europe, a year and a half after a previous summit of the Eastern Partnership ended with a fateful standoff over Ukraine.

Just ahead of the two-day summit in the Latvian capital, Riga, the EU promised grants of 200 million euros ($223 million) over the next 10 years to promote small and medium-sized businesses in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. The EU said the grants were expected to unlock investments of 2 billion euros by companies for the three countries.

But German Chancellor Angela Merkel dampened the hopes of some that the talks would pave the way for EU membership, saying the Eastern Partnership is not a tool for the bloc’s enlargement policy.

“We should therefore not raise any false expectations that we cannot fulfill later,” Merkel told lawmakers in Berlin before heading to Riga.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/eu-careful-not-to-tread-on-moscows-toes-at-eastern-summit/2015/05/21/cba009ba-ff8a-11e4-8c77-bf274685e1df_story.html