ROAR: Russian Opinion and Analytics Review

This Friday ROAR presents two different angles of the EU’s actions in the post-Soviet era, and a report from Washington on the hidden aspects of the Taliban problem.
VREMYA NOVOSTEI writes that yesterday’s Prague summit of the EU’s ‘Eastern Partnership’ program has become a declaration of the fact that the European Union has entered arenas in the post-Soviet era that Russia considers to be the natural sphere of its geopolitical interests.

The Joint Declaration signed in Prague, says the paper, defines the ‘Eastern Partnership’ as a program aiming to support political, social, and economic reform in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine in order to facilitate their closer relations and cooperation with the EU. The paper says Russia was not invited to the summit – and from now on it will have to take into consideration the existence of this new factor in its ‘Nearer Abroad,’ as the post-Soviet era is usually called in Russia.