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Europe and Russia: The Divorce?

For European leaders, this week's EU-Russia summit is little more than a business trip -- there won't be any major announcements, treaty negotiations, or even much pleasure. Do the two sides have anything more to discuss?

The European Union and Russia are staging a business summit in Samara on Friday to discuss future relations between continental governments and Moscow. The original point of the meeting was to negotiate a new treaty on energy and trade, but a slew of controversies have set the two sides at odds -- from a planned American missile shield in Eastern Europe to street violence (or even cyberwar) over a Soviet war memorial in Estonia. All week German papers have blamed these controversies on Russia, and on Friday the Kremlin disappointed them again with the arrest of opposition leaders, including chess champ Gary Kasparov, who were planning to attend a protest at the summit.

Friction between Russia and its old Soviet satellites in Europe has already stalled formal negotiations in Samara -- there won't even be a joint statement released by the EU and Russia, a rare omission for a European summit. But German papers on Friday are asking whether the EU and Russia have any common values left.

The left-wing daily Die Tageszeitung writes:

"The EU and Russia stand at a crossroads. The EU summit in Samara will play out in public a drama which has been perceptible for years but never clearly portrayed. Aside from polite commonplaces, the two sides have nothing to say. Worse, they don't even speak the same language."

"This division between so-called Slavophiles and Westerners was described by Turgenev 150 years ago in his novel 'Smoke': When ten Englishmen meet, they talk about something concrete and positive -- an undersea telegraph line. Germans discuss German unity. Frenchmen end up telling dirty jokes. 'But when the Russians come together,' Turgenev writes, 'they raise the question of the future and meaning of Russia … They chew and chew on this unhappy question. They also take the chance to talk about the lazy West ... We (Russians) curse it, yet we care about its opinion.'"

The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:

"Western emissaries already travel to Moscow as 'crisis managers' -- most recently Condoleezza Rice and Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Relations are cooler (than at the start of Boris Yeltsin's presidency) because of diverging interests that can no longer be cloaked in sentimentality. That's the background of the chancellor's (Angela Merkel's) trip to Samorra as EU president. It won't be a pleasure trip for her, either, but rather a mission of reason and realism. It's realism that is the best way to approach ties with Russia. One should neither try to cover up the country's problematic domestic political practices nor harbor too much optimism about Russia's capability for democratization."

The Financial Times Deutschland writes:

"Anyone wanting to understand why there won't be any groundbreaking agreements at Friday's EU-Russia summit need not even look at the long list of problems that ranges from missile defense to Polish meat exports to Kosovo. All you really need to do is look at the man at the center of it all. Vladimir Putin, Russia's president -- like Tony Blair and George W. Bush -- is what people in the classic model of western democracy like to call a 'lame duck.'"

"Putin is expected to leave office in 10 months, and the way in which EU-Russian ties develop in the longer term will be determined by his successor. At the same time, unlike other lame ducks, Putin is anything but weak right now. Strengthened by his country's oil and gas-driven economic boom, Putin is maneuvering with confidence, and he's sending out signals about Russia's longterm strategy. And nobody thinks, as they do with Bush, that things will suddenly change when Putin is gone."

"This is because of the state of democracy in Russia today. One can't even rule out the possibility that Putin will stay in power -- either by finding a way to remain in office or by maintaining power from a backstage position. This complete lack of certainty is one of the deeper reasons for the current troubles in EU-Russian relations."

The conservative daily Die Welt writes:

"The Kremlin is taking a hard line for itself and its interests in order to destabilize the Europeans, to weaken trans-Atlantic ties and to kill an EU security policy that is anchored in the United States. Regarding Kosovo, which is a flashpoint in Europe, Moscow has become more Serbian than the Serbs."

"Is it a tactic of irritation or a strategy of confrontation? The Europeans won't be doing themselves any favors if they are unable to be decisive or steer clear of firm words. Europe's relationship with Russia isn't dead, but it is off balance."

-- Daryl Lindsey, 2 p.m. CET