Dutch entities that unnecessarily terminated their Gazprom contracts due to government pressure to comply with EU sanctions will be reimbursed entirely, Climate and Energy Minister Rob Jetten (D66/Renew) wrote in a letter to parliament on Wednesday. For fear that the contracts would breach EU sanctions, Jetten pressured Dutch communities, educational …

Replacing Kaliningrad’s name with Królewiec, the city’s original name from the Middle Ages, is madness, the Kremlin said after the Polish geographical standard body’s decision was made public. In 1945, the city was placed under Soviet administration under the Potsdam Agreement and in 1946, it was renamed Kaliningrad after Russian …

Unanimity has been the default voting rule in EU foreign policymaking. Multiple crises could change that status quo. The Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) is one of few remaining policy areas of the European Union that still requires unanimity—meaning the agreement of all twenty-seven member states. At a time …

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made EU enlargement a geopolitical imperative. But internal reforms may be needed before the union can integrate new members. Dimitar Bechev | Visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe Enlargement remains the EU’s flagship foreign policy, but the EU is less and less ready to pursue it. …

The Arab League’s decision to readmit Syria rewards brutality and betrays victims. It also confirms the marginalization of the United States and the irrelevance of Europe in the region. A collection of Arab countries grouped in the Arab League has brought President Bashar al-Assad back into its fold. The twenty-two-member-strong …

Moldova lacks technical and administrative capacity required for EU accession. Brussels needs to do much more to put its European perspective on track. For Moldova, 2022 was the worst of years and the best of years. Russia’s war in Ukraine turned life upside down. The country, often ranked as the …

Since the beginning of the Ukraine war, Europe has struggled to reorient its natural gas supply away from Russia. It has also made efforts to decouple from Russian imports and strengthen cooperation with energy-endowed North African countries in 2022. Thanks to its central geographical position in the Mediterranean Sea and …

On March 18, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mavlut Cavusoglu paid the first visit of its kind to Cairo in a decade. This move reciprocates a recent visit by his Egyptian counterpart, Sameh Shoukri, to the Turkish city of Mersin on February 27, which was in response to the devastating earthquake that …

How to measure soft power? As social power is to a very extent a kind of social capital, the measurement of soft power is, in principle, difficult from the methodological viewpoint concerning social sciences. Methodologically, some indicators are usually used to measure the size of hard power, like geographical resources, …

It looks like 2008 all over again. Economic and financial mismanagement feature in scorching, consuming brilliance. The culpable, bungling banksters, have returned with their customary, venal incompetence. In the customary script, they habitually seek the role of the public purse to socialise their losses. Along the way, they will avoid …