In late November 2015, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker told Russian president Vladimir Putin in a letter that he had asked commission officials to draft new proposals on cooperation between the EU and the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). The idea was promptly condemned by officials from the EU’s eastern member states as sending the wrong signal to Russia at the wrong time. Although this reaction is understandable in light of Russia’s uncooperative stance on Ukraine and Syria, the suggestion is nonetheless interesting in and of itself.
To dismiss institutional cooperation out of hand is not only arrogant, it also risks being seen as seeking a strategy of divide and rule, playing off individual EEU states against each other; precisely the same criticism often voiced by Brussels about the way in which Russia engages the EU.
On the contrary, seeking cooperation in one way or the other could act as an important test of the extent to which Russia is genuinely interested in seeing the EEU establish ties with Western regional organisations. Doing so is important as there are a number of reasons to believe why Russia may not be interested in pursuing meaningful cooperation between the two organisations at all writes Sijbren de Jong in his latest column for Euobserver.
The article was also featured in ‘the Morning Vertical‘; Radio Free Europe’s daily Russia brief.
The full article can be read here.
Photo credit: Kremlin.ru
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