Valdai Club

Office staff rotation and new people in key posts is a difficult problem for any country, as is illustrated by the developments in the United States and the UK. This year has demonstrated that this is also a problem for established and advanced integration communities like the EU.

The EU proudly portrays itself as a community ruled by law, and follows strict rules in its operations. Every five years, however, it faces the challenge of selecting new leaders. All the new leaders are part of the EU’s political elite. They are mainstream politicians who share the view of the EU’s political establishment in general, not its specific representatives.

In 2017-2019, Moscow deliberately sought to aggravate relations with the Council of Europe and the European Union, which runs the international organisation. The stakes were high. Russia stopped multi-million-euro payments to the organisation’s budget in order to force the Parliamentary Assembly of the CoE to lift the sanctions it had imposed on the delegation of Russia’s Federal Assembly. Moscow insisted that blacklisting members should be impossible in principle and that its delegation be invited to resume participation in the Council’s work on an equal and non-discriminatory basis. This financial blackmail plunged the CoE into a severe financial crisis, and forced Brussels to make a difficult decision.

In early May, the European Commission came up with concrete initiatives to bring order to the European Union. If they get approval, Brussels from 2021 will be able to force the member states to implement collectively adopted decisions and strictly adhere to their EU obligations under the threat of the EU funding reduction.

This analytical report proposes a groundbreaking concept of the possible relations between Russia and the European Union which are now seriously hindered by a number of issues such as political and economic disputes and misunderstandings, future security architecture and Europe’s dependence on the Russian energy resources and Ukraine’s transit capabilities.