VLADIMIR PUTIN'S NEW EASTERN APPROACHES

Source: Financial Times

News that Vladimir Putin is to seek a third term of office as Russian president, making the creation of a Eurasian Union the centrepiece of his political enterprise, comes as the prospects of the European Project appear much diminished. Alternatively, has the image of Euroland politics been excessively tarnished in recent months by an Anglo-US government alliance keen to deflect attention away from its own economic woes?

My own take on the new geopolitics is that the Arab Awakening, together with the prospect of closer co-operation between Russia and former Soviet republics, is creating a zone of opportunity between the Tiger economies of China and India and key European and North American markets. In this context, it is important that the British government's policy response is not dominated by an overly ideological approach based on Conservative Euroscepticism.

Prime Minister Cameron, and even President Obama, should also remember that, whilst their Russian colleague may be short in stature, Mr Putin is widely regarded, along with German Chancellor Merkel with whom he shares an old Eastern Bloc hinterland, as a political heavyweight: a status which the two younger, and probably more transient, western leaders have yet to prove.