A senior EU official says Russia's "aggressive" foreign policy is forcing the European Union to speed up plans to bring its ex-Soviet neighbors closer to Brussels. A European Commission official also broke new ground by drawing a link for the first time between the bloc's European Neighborhood Policy and eventual EU membership.
Autonomy Day is being marked in Ukraine's Crimea region on the 18th anniversary of a passing of a referendum on the peninsula's autonomous status.
After a nearly two-week dry spell, Russian gas is once again flowing toward Europe through Ukrainian pipelines. The cutoff was ended after Russian and Ukrainian energy officials on January 19 signed a 10-year contract on gas supplies and transit.
RFE/RL's correspondents across its broadcast region asked local politicians, foreign-policy experts, and civil-society activists a fundamental question about their hopes for the incoming U.S. president: For the good of your country, what would you like to see U.S. President Barack Obama do during his administration?
Russia and Ukraine appear to have finally reached a deal in the protracted dispute that has left Eastern and Central Europe with little or no natural gas for nearly two weeks. After repeatedly failing to reach an agreement over what both sides called a pricing dispute, the country's two prime ministers have produced a deal they said would last the next 10 years.
Bulgarians rallied on January 18 to demand two Soviet-era nuclear reactors be restarted in the face of global economic woes and cuts in gas supply from Russia.
The prime ministers of Ukraine and Russia said on January 18 that they had reached an outline deal to restore gas supplies to European consumers after marathon talks which dragged on into the small hours of the morning.
A new study has found a link between the economic "shock therapy" of mass privatization in postcommunist countries in the early 1990s and a surge in the death rate for working-age men. But one of the authors says it would be inaccurate to say that mass privatization policies are the direct cause of premature deaths.
The ongoing dispute between Russia and Ukraine over natural-gas shipments to Europe has left the European Union eager to re-examine its options for fuel supplies. One alternative is the Nabucco pipeline, which would ship Central Asian gas directly to Europe and circumvent Russia altogether. Reinhard Mitschek is the managing director of the Nabucco pipeline. He spoke with RFE/RL about the future of Nabucco.
Speaking after crisis talks in Moscow, President Dmitry Medvedev said no gas agreement with Ukraine has yet been reached, but that he would like to see supplies resumed to Europe in a "few days." Meanwhile, millions continue to endure winter with little or no heat.
Having now denied many European countries gas for 10 days, Russia may have brutally exposed the vulnerability of the European Union. But it has also shot itself in the foot and forced the EU to get serious about cutting its exposure to Russian provisions. In the end, Moscow's only long-term reward may be the hope it has done irreparable damage to Ukraine's pro-Western ambitions.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has said that Moscow is nearing a deal to deliver gas to European customers after a contract dispute with Ukraine that has cut supplies since the start of the year.
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