"ALL FOR ONE AND ONE FOR ALL!"

The Russia-EU summit in Samara has ended, as predicted, without the main document, the EU-Russia agreement, being signed. No-one had any illusions. The political situation before the talks did not inspire optimism.

The agenda did not promise a love-in either: the summit was to discuss the Iranian nuclear problem, the status of Kosovo, the location of US air defence systems in Eastern Europe and Russia's withdrawal from the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty. Polish Foreign Minister Anna Fotyga refused to attend the summit, as Moscow and Warsaw have not yet settled the export of Polish meat to Russia. On the eve of the meeting Estonia and Lithuania said they might join the Polish veto on the start of talks on the new Russian Federation-EU agreement. The reason was the complication of Tallinn-Moscow relations and the temporary halt to repairs to the Druzhba (Friendship) oil pipeline. Warsaw demanded that the EU adopt a declaration on the solidarity of its members on energy supplies. As a result the European Commission was forced to issue a warning: no documents should be expected to be signed at the end of the summit. This already meant an obvious failure - Sergey Yastrzhembskiy could only partially dispel the pessimism of journalists at his pre-summit press conference and convince them that things weren't too bad.

The sore points in relations between the two sides are well-known. The European Union has often criticized Russia for violating human rights, while the recent dispersals of the "marches of those who disagree" only fanned the flames. Europe is also concerned about energy security. And finally, on the eve of the summit, Brussels surprised Moscow by supporting Estonia in its conflict with Russia. To be accurate, Moscow had known about all this for a long time, but it looked as though they were counting on smoothing things over with the help of a tested strategic tool, oil. The views of Moscow politicians that the EU and Russia cannot escape one another and are destined to cooperate, etc., now have an all too clear supplementary text: oil supplies are not an argument for the dispersal of "marches of those who disagree". 

The press conference at the end of the summit left no doubts: the EU and Russia are not going through the best period in the history of their relations. "We agreed on almost all issues except the contentious ones that require further work and study. As a rule these are issues within the sphere of the economic egoism of one European country or another," Russian President Vladimir Putin announced. Analysts have no doubt that when he referred to the actions of "one European country or another", the Kremlin leader had in mind Poland with its veto on discussion of a new Russian Federation-EU agreement because of Moscow's embargo on the import of Polish meat, and Estonia with its accusations that Russia organized the events in Tallinn and the cyber attacks on the government. Putin could also have meant Lithuania which is demanding the resumption of Russian oil supplies. "We agreed on customs cooperation, we agreed on cooperation in the fight against organized crime and narcotics," Putin went on to say.

However, when the head of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, spoke, it became clear that the problem of "one European country or another" was far more serious than might appear at first sight. Barroso said directly that the issue of Polish meat and the situation in Estonia had already reached a European level and were not a problem just between Russia and the two countries. "We want to say to our Russian partners that a difficulty for a member state is a difficulty for all of us in the European Union. We are a union based on the principles of solidarity. We are now 27 member states so a Polish problem is a European problem," Barroso said. "A Lithuanian, an Estonian problem is a European problem as well. The EU operates on the principle of solidarity," Interfax news agency quoted Barroso as saying. In other words, the European Union behaved according to the well-known principle of "all for one and one for all". 

However, another understandable factor is at play too. There have been quite a few discussions in the international media over the past few years about changes in European policy, especially after the start of the second Iraq war. The leaders of old Europe refused to support American plans to strike Iraq and took open offence at new Europe's support for the USA. Things went as far as Jacques Chirac's sensational remarks that these countries had missed a good opportunity to keep quiet, which angered Poland, Hungary and other states. Then there was the series of failures of referendums on the European Constitution and the decision on a moratorium on the expansion of the EU where many analysts also saw a split between new and old Europe. Attitudes toward the North European Gas Pipeline were very different in Berlin and Warsaw. Moscow did not pay particular attention to the remarks of the Estonian ambassador to Russia, Marina Kaljurand, in a discussion on Russian television: "When you ask why Europe is not intervening, remember that we are Europe." Estonia is, after all, a member of the EU and NATO, but Russia was convinced that the North European Gas Pipeline would make old Europe calm down and old Europe would in turn make new Europe keep quiet.

The EU's reaction was such that Russia's permanent representative, Vladimir Chizhov, said in an offended tone that "The European Union has adopted a hypocritical stance on this issue, it gave a weak reaction to events in Tallinn and a furious one to Moscow's response." Moreover, NATO has de facto been included in the conflict: North Atlantic Alliance experts are studying the proposals by Estonian Defence Minister Jaak Aaviksoo to consider the hacker attacks on the servers of NATO member states to be tantamount to military aggression. A special NATO centre will soon appear in Estonia, which will help Tallinn in the cyber war, primarily against Russia. Estonian Defence Minister Jaak Aaviksoo brought this subject to the international level when he took part in a meeting of EU defence ministers in Brussels. He described the actions as "an attack by hostile forces". "This is no longer simple hooliganism; this is a strike against the state. If another state blockades our ports with its ships or our air space with its fighter jets, this would be clearly understood. And I do not see any basic difference when hostile forces are blockading state information channels," Aaviksoo said. At the same time Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet called for the question of the cyber attacks to be raised separately at the Russia-EU summit on 18 May. Analysts say that it is standard procedure in politics to make use of others' disagreements. However, Moscow clearly overestimated the disagreements between old and new Europe and underestimated the potential of Nashi and Young Russia's pickets of the Estonian embassy, which broke the Vienna Convention, to influence European politicians in a completely different way from what Moscow expected. 

In Russia itself liberal publications talk about a serious crisis in foreign policy, not all the reasons for which lie in objective disagreements. Novyye Izvestiya notes that Russia is gradually being surrounded by a tighter ring of unfriendly states. The recent events around the dismantling of the Bronze Soldier statue in Estonia added to the ranks of the Russian Federation's "bad neighbours". Relations with 11 out of 17 countries bordering Russia can now be described as bad, while disagreements with only three of them - Japan, China and Norway - can be said to have been caused by historical factors. Russia does not intend to give to Japan the four disputed islands in the Kuril chain, while Japan insists on considering them its northern territories. Russia has a similar conflict with Norway - the waters of the Barents Sea have not been divided. Russia has settled its border disputes with China in recent years, but not in its favour, giving China one and a half islands on the Amur River. The source of the conflict here is the unequal settlement of the two countries' border areas. Approximately 10 million people live on the Russian side of the border while more than 100 million live on the Chinese side. Moreover, the population is growing on the Chinese side and falling on the Russian side. Russia's remaining argumentative neighbours are former USSR republics and Poland too, a former Warsaw Pact ally. The newspaper recalls that last year serious friction arose in Russia's relations with Georgia while relations with Ukraine and Belarus have also deteriorated considerably in recent years. With the former this happened after the conflict over the division of the Black Sea Fleet and Russia's interference in the standoff between presidential candidates Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych. As a result Russia increased the price charged to Ukraine for gas while Ukraine made joining NATO a priority. Russia has formally been building a union state with Belarus since 1994, but in reality the economic integration of the two countries has collapsed. There is no single currency or single legislation; moreover, this year customs officers started to collect a tax on drivers for using the other country's roads. When Russia raised the price charged to Belarus for gas this winter, the Belarusian side responded by increasing the payment for shipment via its territory, which led to a temporary halt to oil exports to Europe. Russia is now faced with the need to build an oil pipeline bypassing its western neighbour, who until recently was considered its most faithful ally. 

Traditionally relations with the Baltic states have never been the best. The press has quoted the views of political scientist Dmitriy Oreshkin, who thinks that Russia's current ideology is an attempt to gain revenge and restore a great power. He says, however, that "Russia does not have what it takes to be a centre of gravity and geopolitical influence - a powerful, diversified economy". Citizens of the former Soviet republics want to live like people "in Germany, not Smolensk Region" so "everyone is orientated towards the West". Russia can only limit the import of local goods or raise fuel prices. Oreshkin thinks that of all the former Soviet states relations can be described as "good" only with Armenia, which depends on Russian fuel supplies and the presence of the Russian military base in Gyumri, and with the Central Asian republics. Oreshkin thinks that this is indicative for current Russian policy, when "there is no success anywhere on the European flank while we're not doing badly with the East and regimes like Turkmenbashy's". He said that these countries' gravitation towards Russia is linked with their comparative lack of development. 

However, the director of the Institute of CIS Countries, State Duma member Konstantin Zatulin, said that "we should not look for friends amongst our neighbours". "These are countries going through a period of establishing their independence and it is logical to look for booty amongst them, not friends," he said. Commenting on the actions of the Russian authorities, Zatulin said that "an abrupt transition has taken place from indifference to one's interests to defending them" and the very independence of post-Soviet republics "is already a declaration of will that is not in our favour". 

You do not need to be an accomplished political scientist to guess that whether Russia continues to have hostile relations with its neighbours or will be surrounded by reliable, stable partners depends on whether supporters of Oreshkin's or Zatulin's views take the upper hand in the Kremlin.