Tag "CEPA"
By Dalia Bankauskaitė, for CEPA On 30 November, Lithuania’s National Commission for Energy Control and Prices (NCC), the independent agency that regulates energy fees in accordance with the international energy market, gave final approval to domestic electricity and gas rates for 2019. Electricity prices for residential consumers will rise by 15 percent, while residential gas prices will rise by 15-20 percent. Industrial consumers will also have to pay more: a 40 percent increase in electricity rates…
By Edward Lucas, for CEPA Once again, Russia has pushed the line in Ukraine. Here’s how the West should have reacted after Azov. Imagine that it is September 1st 1939. German troops have just attacked Poland. Should the outside world (a) call for calm, (b) denounce Hitler’s aggression, or (c) help Poland? Seen from a modern perspective, the answer is clear. Pre-war Poland, although far from perfect, was the innocent party…
By Donald N. Jensen, Peter B. Doran, for CEPA 15 November 2018 Can Vladimir Putin’s nonlinear strategy succeed against the West? For all of Russia’s weaknesses as a Great Power, the Kremlin increasingly is willing to take risks—sometimes recklessly—to balance its disadvantages against the relative power of Western competitors like the United States. Risk taking is a dangerous business for any state—declining or otherwise. But what if the Kremlin believed that…
By Edward Lucas, for CEPA Edward Lucas seams together a Soviet chic garment and the Kremlin’s inability to deal honestly with history. Nazi memorabilia is not cool. If you hold your nose and look on the internet, you can find flags, T-shirts and bumper stickers commemorating the Third Reich on sale at outlets that also sell pagan-themed cigarette lighters and Ku Klux Klan regalia. But no reputable retailer would stock…
By Edward Lucas, for CEPA When we are attacked, we are quick to call on other countries for help. Fixing our own problems is a lot harder. That is the story of the West’s response to the Russian “hybrid war”—the intensifying mixture of cyber, diplomatic, economic, military, and propaganda attacks. After the attempted assassination last month in Salisbury of a retired British spy, Britain was quick to call on its…
By Edward Lucas, for CEPA Deterrence and resilience are the two tasks facing the West as the threat from the Kremlin becomes ever clearer. Striking the balance between the two is the strategic challenge for the coming years. The most important part is resilience. The less Russian attacks are effective, the less we need to deter them. If our political system is immune to dirty money, if our media offer…
By Urve Eslas, for CEPA Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in a 17 February speech at the Munich Security Conference, described as “Russophobic” neighboring countries that oppose Russia’s core interests. The media’s use of this term has increased remarkably since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. The Kremlin’s weaponization of the word has also been applied in recent years to Estonia. Unfortunately Estonia itself seems to have adopted this label as well. On 8…
By CEPA People often assume that Latvia has two completely separate, self-sufficient information spaces: one for Latvian speakers and the other for Russian speakers. While this is largely true for traditional media, a recent study of international news by Latvia’s Center for East European Policy Studies (CEEPS) shows that online, this division is less conspicuous and more nuanced. The study, conducted in collaboration with CEPA experts, offers a more subtle…
By Dalia Bankauskaitė, for CEPA On 5 February, Lithuanian news outlets reported that Russia had stationed several of its newest high-precision weapons—the Iskander-M nuclear-capable missile, with a range of 415-500 km—in the Kaliningrad region and that it intends to leave the missiles there permanently. Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė said the deployment “is not just a threat to Lithuania, but to half of all Europe.” Three pro-Kremlin media outlets in Russian and Lithuanian—Eskerptai.eu,…
By Janusz Bugajski, for CEPA Moscow has manufactured a thick mist of disinformation about NATO in order to disguise its expansionist policies in Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, lurking behind this propaganda offensive is a genuine fear in the Kremlin that the North Atlantic alliance will thwart Kremlin ambitions and weaken the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russia’s NATO myth-making can be debunked by examining the evidence. According to Moscow’s deceptions,…
