 |
EU-Russia summit focus on energy and trade
EU leaders were also expected to press Russian President Dmitry Medvedev for more assurances on energy supplies and for a bigger commitment to climate change ahead of a crucial UN global warming conference in Copenhagen next month.
Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said that Russia must curb greenhouse gas emissions.
“A lot of this could be achieved through increased energy efficiency, and we have offered to collaborate with Russia in this area,” said Reinfeldt, whose country currently holds the EU presidency.
Russia has said it is willing to cut emissions by 10-15 percent from 1990 levels, while EU members are committed to 20 percent reductions by 2020.
The meeting in Stockholm was the 24th EU-Russia summit. Generally, Russia feels that the biannual talks have been slowed by EU expansion and the union’s drive for internal reform.
“It’s difficult doing things with the European Union,” Russia’s envoy to the EU, Vladimir Chizhov, told journalists.
He said it was still unclear how Russia would coordinate agreements with the EU after its new reform treaty enters into force on Dec. 1. EU leaders hope to pick the union’s first full-time president and a new foreign policy chief -- top positions created by the so-called Lisbon treaty -- later this week.
Relations between the two hit a low with Russia’s August 2008 war with Georgia and Moscow’s decision in January to halt natural gas deliveries because of a dispute with Ukraine, leaving millions of EU citizens in the cold.
“EU-Russia relations aren’t the greatest right now, and so the expectations [for the summit] are probably not set too high,” said Carolina Vendil-Pallin, a Russia expert at the Swedish Defence Research Agency in Stockholm.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin warned last week that Russia would again close the valves on gas pipelines flowing west if Ukraine fails to pay for its shipments or begins siphoning illegally -- a warning that raised the hackles of some EU leaders.
Russia is the EU’s largest energy supplier, providing 20 percent of the bloc’s natural gas through the Ukrainian pipeline.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| AMANDA PAUL |  |
||
| Ukraine: a lost country | |||
| MÜMTAZER TÜRKÖNE |  |
||
| The 52nd anniversary of May 27 | |||
| ABDULLAH BOZKURT |  |
||
| Turkey and Mexico: Distant yet so close | |||
| BERİL DEDEOĞLU |  |
||
| Yemen and beyond | |||
| ARZU KAYA URANLI |  |
||
| On Memorial Day a few words to make your day memorable | |||
| ABDÜLHAMİT BİLİCİ |  |
||
| Google kidnaps Gül! | |||
| CUMALİ ÖNAL |  |
||
| Critical months for Egypt | |||
| DOĞU ERGİL |  |
||
| Qualities of power | |||
| İHSAN YILMAZ |  |
||
| The Egyptian elections, Islam and Islamists | |||
| EMRE USLU |  |
||
| Operational errors | |||
| MARKAR ESAYAN |  |
||
| There is need for a new initiative | |||
| JOOST LAGENDIJK |  |
||
| Europe can’t have it all. Or can it? | |||
| HASAN KANBOLAT |  |
||
| Are Russian tourists being discouraged from visiting Turkey? | |||
| MELİH ARAT |  |
||
| Handmade | |||
| KLAUS JURGENS |  |
||
| Back to the ’80s | |||
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
