Putin Dictating Agenda to Eu, Thinktank Report Says

Europe has lost the plot in trying to cope with a resurgent Russia under President Vladimir Putin, who is dictating the agenda in his dealings with European capitals, according to a study published yesterday.

The west's post-cold war policy of promoting democracy and westernization in Russia has failed. "That strategy is now in tatters," said the 65-page report from the European Council on Foreign Relations. "Today it is Moscow that sets the pace for EU-Russia relations. Russia [is] more powerful, less cooperative, and more intransigent. Russia's growing confidence has transformed the EU-Russia relationship."

As Moscow turns its back on the west and wields its UN security council veto to stymie western policy while holding Europe as its energy hostage, Brussels is flailing incoherently, the report found.

"Today it is the Kremlin that sets the agenda for EU-Russia relations," said Joschka Fischer, the former German foreign minister, who jointly chairs the council, an independent think tank.

The EU's economy is 15 times the size of Russia's and its population three times that of its neighbor, but Brussels finds itself consistently outwitted, the report said.

The challenge posed by Mr Putin has come into sharp focus this year. He is blocking a European plan to take control of the southern Balkan province of Kosovo and steer it to independence. Every time he has come to western Europe recently, Mr Putin has stolen the show with belligerent performances. In February in Munich he accused President George Bush of trying to take over the world. A fortnight ago in Lisbon, he used an EU-Russia summit to warn of a replay of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 if the US sited parts of its missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Mark Leonard, the council's executive director and one of the report's authors, grouped the EU into five clusters, ranging from the new "cold warriors" of Poland and the Baltic states who are suspicious of Moscow's intentions, to the "Trojan horses" of Cyprus and Greece, Orthodox Christian countries sympathetic to Moscow's aims. Between these extremes sit Germany, France and Italy, keen to strike a "strategic partnership" with Moscow and reluctant to alienate Russia; "friendly pragmatists" such as Austria and Hungary; and "frosty pragmatists" such as the Netherlands emphasizing human rights issues and democratic shortcomings. Britain is included among the latter.

There is scant agreement within the EU, the report found, between those who want to "contain" Russia, and those, like the German Social Democrats with their preference for "Ostpolitik", who seek to change Russia by integrating it in a web of "interdependence" with the west.

Mr Putin has gained the upper hand by a policy of divide and rule with the Europeans, bypassing Brussels, dealing with individual countries, and exploiting rifts between EU states. This "systematic policy of coercive bilateralism" uses "diplomatic pressure, trade embargos, transport blockades, renegotiation of gas or oil supply contracts. Moscow's readiness to use coercion in foreign policy has shifted the terms of the debate."