By DPA
Moscow : Almost 20 years after the end of the Cold War, the mutual suspicion that bred conflict still bedevils the relationship between the European Union and Russia.
“The Cold War narrative never went away. It existed in Russia throughout the post-Soviet era, and it’s picking up again in the West,” David Galbreath, an expert in international relations at Aberdeen University, told DPA.
On Friday, top EU officials are set to meet Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in Portugal.
On the agenda are issues ranging from energy security, Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the future of Kosovo, to human rights, trade rows and Russia’s aim to join the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
The atmosphere was glacial at the last bi-yearly summit in the Russian city of Samara in May, which took place at the peak of heightened tensions between Russia and new, post-Communist member states.
Ethnic Russians rioted in Estonia over the removal of a war memorial from central Tallinn, and Poland vetoed a new strategic partnership agreement over a Russian ban of Polish meat imports.
But Russia’s top representative to the EU Sergei Yastrzhembsky said the climate surrounding negotiation had changed going into the Lisbon summit.
“The atmosphere today is different, more positive. We did not hear this going into the other summit, but we do now and we like it,” he told journalists at a press conference ahead of the talks Wednesday.
But experts say that are dogged by feelings of mutual suspicion and wounded pride dating to the Cold War.
“Putin has built his power base on the Cold War rhetoric, saying ‘the West can’t hold us down any more.’ Now the West is picking up the rhetoric again,” Galbreath said.
Many of the EU’s new member states, which were satellites of Moscow under Soviet rule, still fear that Kremlin’s long-term goal is to restore its old dominance.
“On certain issues, the first instinct is a certain paranoia. Deals done behind our backs are a sensitive historical trauma,” said Nils Muiznieks, expert on EU-Russia issues at the Latvian University.
Russia’s ambassador to the EU Vladimir Chizhov countered “repeated accusations that Russia has a “divide-and-conquer” policy.
In comments on the Foreign Ministry’s web site, he said it would be easier to deal with an “EU that speaks with a single voice” than juggling the disperse desires of the 27-nation bloc.
“On a bilateral level our relations are developing in general, better that with the EU,” Yastrzhembsky emphasized.
The EU’s new members are not the only ones to feel deeply suspicious of Moscow’s intentions. On the last day of 2005, Russia’s gas monopolist Gazprom shut off supplies to Ukraine in a dispute, which Western analysts called “politically motivated”.
After Gazprom closed the taps, politicians across the EU called for a wholesale rethink of EU energy-security policies. Many accused the Kremlin of manipulating its energy resources for political manipulation.
The EU has now proposed a law banning foreign energy companies from buying its energy networks. EU insiders call it the “Gazprom clause.”
Russia has called the move protectionist and unfair, and gas monopoly Gazprom counts on its partnership with French, German and Italian energy giants to lobby against the legislation.
“It is only a draft at the moment,” Yastrzhembsky underlined.
“If that law is implemented, it’ll mean the EU is playing hardball for the first time ever in relations with Russia,” Muiznieks said.
The move, together with EU criticisms of Russia’s human-rights record and interest in Russian neighbours such as Ukraine, have aroused at least as much suspicion in Moscow, where they are seen as blending hypocrisy with territorial aggression.
Russia regretted that the EU disdained to include in the agenda for the talks US plans for a missile defence system in Eastern Europe, which Moscow considers a menace to its security.
The principal of European solidarity is fickle, Yastrzhembsky told journalists Wednesday.
He pointed to Poland, which he said had flip-flopped between recruiting EU allies to counter Russia’s ban of meat imports and acting independently on the issue of missile defence.
“Poland draws on EU solidarity when talking about meat imports to Russia, but on questions of vital international security it talks directly with Washington,” he said.
The recent defeat of the ruling party in Poland’s elections Sunday saw cautious optimism that the change of government would herald a change for the better in relations with the EU.
But with the mutual suspicion bred in the Cold War still in the air, there is a real danger that rational debate on genuine grievances will be overshadowed by the clouds of a war, which ended 15 years ago.