🇪🇺 Dangerous, short-sighted, immature foreign policy initiatives are now at the centre of the EU agenda.

Many observers are puzzled about what guides the countries of Europe amid the current European security crisis, the largest in 80 years.

🔹 Many of the decisions being made by the EU national governments seem reckless and counterproductive, leading to the threshold of nuclear escalation.

🔹 Europe has neglected its own economic interests and put an end to centuries of economic cooperation with Russia.

🔹 It seems that the political strategy of the EU is dominated not by calculation, but by the slogans that guide the leaders of Britain, Poland and the Baltic countries. The voices of the more prudent countries in Western Europe are muffled.

This trajectory would be rational if the calculation of the collective West to defeat Russia had some chance of success – but since it doesn’t, now many in the EU are perplexed over how to get out of the impasse.

A scenario is likely, in which the United States, seeing that Western Europe will no longer come to its senses after a lethargic sleep and "holidays" from strategic thinking, will bet on developing its presence in Eastern Europe, strengthening Polish plans to create the Intermarium project – to create an antagonist to Russia in the space between the Baltic and Black Seas. This will form a very special strategic situation in Europe, writes Valdai Club programme director Andrey Sushentsov.

https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/children-s-crusade-europe-s-strategy

#ModernDiplomacy #EU #Europe

🗣🗣🗣

🇪🇺🚫 The European Union has introduced its eleventh package of sanctions against Russia.

The main intrigue of the package was restrictive measures against foreign countries and organisations that interact with Russia. It pertains to cooperation in those areas that are one way or another under EU sanctions.

Obviously, when developing new mechanisms, the EU was guided by the rich experience of the United States. Americans have been using three tools for a long time – secondary sanctions, the expansion of export restrictions, and criminal and administrative prosecutions. In the first case, the US Treasury simply imposes blocking sanctions on individuals and entities that are suspected of circumventing sanctions. Such measures were widely used against Russian counterparties abroad under all large packages of US sanctions in 2023.

The question is: how exactly will the European Union achieve the promotion of its export control rules and other sanctions against Russia abroad?

The course towards the economic blockade of Russia continues. Russia itself continues its policy of adapting to new restrictive measures, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Ivan Timofeev.

https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/eleventh-package-of-eu-sanctions-what-s-new/

#EconomicStatecraft #EU #sanctions

🗣🗣🗣

🧳 Will customs in EU countries undress Russian citizens?

The EU sanctions policy against Russia includes a wide range of measures. These include blocking financial sanctions, sectoral restrictions, transport and visa bans, export controls on a wide range of goods, as well as a ban on the import of a number of goods from Russia. The latter measure can be described as import controls. Its goal is to deprive Moscow of income from the sale of these goods on the markets of EU member countries. Brussels has banned the import of a number of strategic raw materials from Russia, including oil, petroleum products, coal, ferrous metallurgy products, gold, and others.

At the same time, a number of other items were also banned. This norm is postulated in Art. 3i of Council Regulation 833/2014. The direct or indirect import of certain goods from Russia to the EU is prohibited, as well as the related provision of intermediary and financial services. Appendix XXI reveals the list of titles. It is very diverse: you can find products ranging from caviar to cement, chemical products, fertilizers, soap, rubber, paper, pumps, refrigerators, bearings, engines, telephones, cars, cameras and much more. Obviously, shipments of such goods had no chance of passing customs.

But what should be done if a Russian citizen imports this or that product for personal use? The most obvious example is entering the EU in a private car.

Russian tourists are distinguished by courage — they often venture to more extreme jurisdictions, and being deprived of toilet paper or a camera might seem trifling. But if the practice becomes widespread, another nail will be driven into the coffin of human ties between Russia and the EU, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Ivan Timofeev. 

https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/will-customs-in-eu-countries-undress-russians/

#EconomicStatecraft #EU #sanctions

🗣🗣🗣

🇪🇺 The economic consequences of sanctions for Europe are already far-reaching.

🔹 EU countries are not able to compensate for the economic losses caused by sanctions against the Russian Federation.

🔹 First of all, this concerns the energy and raw materials sectors. The huge increase in prices for these resources is causing serious damage to the industry. European industry is increasingly falling behind global competition.

🔹 With the introduction of sanctions against Russia, the process of deindustrialisation of Europe is accelerating.

🔹 This combination of inflation and recession is leading to an economic crisis in Europe that will continue for many years.

This will result in a permanent loss of wealth for Western societies, writes Ulrike Reisner, freelance political analyst, lecturer & journalist, based in Vienna, Austria, PICREADI expert.

https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/losses-due-to-sanctions-grow-in-the-west/

#EconomicStatecraft #EU #sanctions

🗣🗣🗣

🌎🌏 Recent processes, especially the crisis in the Middle East, may open a new chapter in how most countries around the world perceive the policies of the United States and Europe, as well as make it impossible to return to the previous world order.

Israel's confrontational policy does not pose a direct threat to Russia, the United States or China, the main powers of the modern world, and they are not going to cross their swords over what the Middle East region should look like after the events of this fall. But it would be short-sighted to underestimate the detrimental effect that some features of the position chosen by the West have had on the credibility of the United States and its allies among the world community. 

The West is erasing its own previous achievements. A huge part of the world's population has clearly become convinced of the boundless cynicism and duplicity of the political elites, brought to the top of the power hierarchy by the vaunted democratic system.

Due to their obsession with the current election cycle and their own career ambitions, the current leaders of the West aren’t hesitating to jettison the enormous achievements of past years in building trust in international relations and a balance of interests at the global level, writes Timofei Bordachev, Programme Director of the Valdai Discussion Club.

https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/how-the-world-majority-sees-the-consequences/

#Asia_and_Eurasia #UnitedStates #EU #WorldMajority

🗣🗣🗣

🇪🇺 The Ukrainian crisis itself was, to a certain extent, the result of the fact that the continental Europe has lost all ability to be strategically independent.

This occurred as part of a gradual process that combined the consequences of the events of the middle of the last century and the failure of attempts to build a genuine political union on the basis of European integration, combining this with the expansion of the membership and the creation of a common economic policy through financial instruments within the Eurozone.

The actual position of Europeans in world politics is increasingly consistent with how we might see it in terms of abstract assessments of the relationship with the United States and their ability to act independently, Valdai Club Programme Director Timofei Bordachev writes.

https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/consequences-of-europe-s-strategic-failure/

#Asia_and_Eurasia #EU #Europe

🗣🗣🗣

⛔️ Amid the second anniversary of the start of the Special Military Operation (SVO) in Ukraine, a number of Western countries and associations launched a new set of sanctions against Russia, as expected.

💢 The most significant package of restrictive measures was introduced by the United States. More than 500 Russian citizens and organisations were included in the list of blocked entities. Secondary sanctions against a number of companies from third countries cooperating with Russia can be considered equally common. 

💢 As for the EU, the new sanctions have their own characteristic: 87 organisations and 105 individuals were included in the lists of blocked persons. However, even here the structure of the distribution of sanctions changes little. The new secondary EU sanctions have become peculiar. A number of companies from Turkey, Thailand, Kazakhstan, China, Serbia, India, Singapore, Uzbekistan and Sri Lanka have been listed in Annex IV of Regulation 833/2014.

💢 The UK has extended blocking financial sanctions to a number of large Russian industrial companies. The country has also decided to introduce secondary sanctions against Russia’s partners from third countries, but unlike Brussels, it has applied the mechanism of blocking sanctions to them. They include companies from Turkey, China, the UAE and Switzerland. 

💢 The lists of blocked persons have also been expanded or are about to be expanded by Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. 

In quantitative terms, the number of Russian companies and citizens subject to restrictive measures was indeed high. However, the latest wave of sanctions does not bring qualitative changes - their impact on the Russian economy and its relations with foreign partners is unlikely to be fundamental, writes Ivan Timofeev, Programme Director of the Valdai Discussion Club.

https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/new-sanctions-against-russia-taking-a-swing/

#Multipolarity_and_Connectivity #sanctions #UnitedStates #EU #UK

🗣🗣🗣

🇪🇺 The European Union’s Green Deal must be criticised for three reasons:

▪️ it is dogmatic, because it does not provide for alternative scenarios;

▪️ it is economically highly problematic, because it burdens industry in Europe with costs and uncertainties and therefore restricts its international competitiveness;

▪️ it is technologically immature and unrealistic: neither the market-ready technologies nor the financial means to implement the Commission’s goal of reducing net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050 are available.

Pursued under the concept of the Green Deal, the energy transition has been one of the strongest and most damaging factors influencing the economy of the Federal Republic of Germany, and therefore the economy of Europe. This policy is primarily being pursued by Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission and Olaf Scholz’s cabinet.

Any measure that hinders the supply of affordable energy to Europe, such as the continuation of sanctions or a premature withdrawal from long-term gas supply contracts, will cause massive damage to the European economy and set the EU back by years, if not decades, Ulrike Reisner writes.

https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/the-dark-side-of-brussels-energy-policy-the-green/

🖇️ Earlier this year, we published the first and the second part of this analysis.

#GlobalAlternatives #EU #energy

🗣🗣🗣

❓🇪🇺 On the eve of the next elections to the European Parliament (EP), which are due to take place on June 6-9, 2024, the attention of experts, as usual, is on the Eurosceptic parties, which are once again predicted to increase their presence.

In the most general terms, Euroscepticism reflects an attitude of protest regarding deepening European integration, the transfer of states’ sovereign power to the supranational level and the power of European political elites at the expense of democratic legitimacy and transparency.

But is Euroscepticism as dangerous as they say, and will it be possible to shake the positions of the ruling centre-right coalition led by the European People's Party (EPP), asks Daria Moiseeva, senior research fellow at IMEMO RAS.

https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/eurosceptics-in-the-european-parliament-a-failed-a/

#WiderEurasia #EU #EuropeanParliament #Euroscepticism

🗣🗣🗣