A Tug-of-War in Europe: Europe’s Newest Members Are Wary of Dealing With Russia
In a commentary for Russia Profile, Inessa Petrova notes that the European enlargements of 2004 and 2007 have had a dramatic impact on the relations between Russia and the EU.
Petrova comments that since 1999, the majority of new entrants into European alliances have been former Soviet satellites for whom Russia is a potential source of fear in the near-term. At the same time, these countries are a permanent thorn in Russia's side since they are thought to serve the interests of the United States - a potentially dangerous player in Russia's backyard. Furthermore, in the past 20 years these countries have done plenty of damage to Moscow's pride and geopolitical interests, including NATO enlargement in the late 1990s and the anti-missile shield deployment crises in 2007 and 2008.
Leonid Ivashov, the president of the Academy of Geopolitical Issues, notes that East European countries border both Russian-Eurasian and Roman-German civilizations. As such they are very useful political instruments, which help to put pressure on both Western Europe and Russia. East Europeans' pro-Americanism became so controversial within the EU that some experts said it was one of the major obstacles to further European integration and the development of the EU's foreign and defense policies.
Petrova notes that when Russia has achieved improvement in relations with certain countries, it has been principally related to energy policy. Croatia, Romania and Hungary, as well as Slovakia and the Czech Republic, depend on Russian energy resources, and this contributes to the interests that these countries have in common. But the most important change has been on the American side, with several retired East European leaders expressing their concern about the future of their countries' relations with the United States and Russia.
According to Petrova, the special relationship between the United States and Eastern Europe, and between the United States and Great Britain, is being replaced by a US-EU partnership. She calls on President Barak Obama to restore the European trust in the United States that was damaged by his predecessor and notes that Obama's passivity in Eastern Europe may also be interpreted as part of his intention to "reset" relations with Russia.