The EU, Russia’s No. 1 customer and investor, was set to give its neighbor a boost yesterday by resuming cooperation talks suspended after Russia’s war with Georgia.
Critics say it is too soon to forgive Russia because its troops remain implanted and unchecked in the two breakaway Georgian provinces at the core of the war.
But with the financial crisis shaking global markets, officials of the 27-nation EU say reaching out to Moscow is crucial to ensuring stability and to keeping Russia from shutting off its economy to outsiders.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and French President Nicolas Sarkozy — whose country holds the rotating EU presidency — were to meet in Nice yesterday in a summit expected to formalize the resumption of talks.
“The conflict in Georgia has emphasized the crucial need for permanent political dialogue between the EU and the Russian Federation, while the global economic crisis has underlined once more the interdependence between the EU and Russian economies,” European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said ahead of the summit.
EU foreign ministers agreed earlier this week to resume talks with Russia, put on hold in September. They aim for an agreement that would increase economic integration, tighten relations on justice and security and boost cooperation in education and science.
Russia recently threatened to install short-range missiles close to EU borders in response to US plans to install a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic — though Medvedev has since scaled back the threat.
“We cautioned the EU and its member states about starting the partnership and cooperation negotiations in light of Russia not fulfilling the ceasefire agreement” ending the Georgia war, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State David Merkel said in a statement.
In related news, Russia will pull out of the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty if ex-Soviet Ukraine and Georgia are set on the path to NATO membership, Interfax news agency quoted a government official as saying yesterday.
“If Ukraine and Georgia are granted NATO Membership Action Plans [MAP], then the revised CFE treaty will be doomed,” Interfax quoted an official as saying.
“If MAP starts being implemented for Ukraine and Georgia, Russia will not only continue the moratorium it imposed on the CFE, but will ultimately pull out of it.”
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS