... and the frontline role in view of a potential armed conflict in Europe.
Vadim Trukhachev
Vadim Trukhachev: the Visegrad Gainers from Ukraine Tragedy
The obvious beneficiary appears to be the Visegrad Group of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, where both Russia-haters and opponents of sanctions are set to obtain dividends.
Domestic Politics
Newly elected Polish president Andrzej Duda, whose campaign was permeated with the Ukraine parlance and insistence on military assistance to Kiev,...
... CEE policies of the European Union. Director of RAS Institute for European Studies Alexey Gromyko underlined the importance of the Visegrad Group for development of its member states and cooperation of Russia with Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. Ambassador Priputen summed up the results of the Slovak presidency in the Visegrad Group.
Roundtable "The Visegrad Europe and Russia Today"
... often brought up: in the 1960s, the per capita GDP in Czechoslovakia amounted to 60–65% of the Austrian, whereas in 1991, after the complete withdrawal of Soviet troops,
it fell to virtually 16%
. This fact is quite obvious: Czechoslovakia and Hungary and Poland developed more slowly than Austria. At the same time, the state of affairs with respect to the development of the countries of Central-Eastern Europe before and after the socialist period deserves separate attention.
Table 1.
per capita ...
... with the details of Alexis Tsipras’ visit to Moscow, a remarkable meeting took place on 7 April 2015 in Budapest. Following an initiative by the Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto, a meeting was organised between the foreign ministers of Hungary, Serbia, Macedonia, Greece and Turkey (Ankara being represented by Volkan Bozkir, Minister for EU Affairs). The composition of this group certainly recalls the proposed route of the Turkish Stream pipeline, a project which was Russia’s reaction ...
... on February 17, 2015, which lasted just 5-6 hours, has caused the majority of experts to indulge in all sorts of speculations. The main declared purpose of the trip – the need to revise and renew the agreement of 1996 on Russian gas supplies to Hungary – had, apparently, been stipulated and agreed upon well in advance, and therefore it was expected that some new initiatives would be discussed during the visit. Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin held a two-hour conversation tête-à-tête,...
... activity was observed in 1998 when, after almost five years of stagnation, the four countries’ prime ministers met in Budapest and signed an agreement on the resumption of cooperation. It is indicative that this was preceded by the invitation to Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic to join NATO.
The third peak happened in the mid-2000s. It was related to the first steps of the group as EU members and was characterized by their desire to achieve equal rights with other EU member states and adjust ...
... EU’s apparent inability to preserve democratic and human rights guarantees, as laid down in the Copenhagen criteria, once a country is inside the Union. Worries about Austria in the early 2000s, later Poland, Romania, and the ongoing woes about Hungary seem to have solidified the notion in European officialdom that it is an issue they have to resolve and indeed quickly - Hungary looks already lost.
The argument that issues of democracy should remain the member states’ competence and ...
Since its landslide victory at the general elections in 2010, Hungary’s governing Fidesz party and its leader, Viktor Orbán, have been pursuing an ‘opening to the East’. Behind this should lie a reasonable rapprochement with Russia and the resource-rich countries of the Caucasus and the ...
Withdrawal from the Russian market in the 1990-ies was a strategic mistake of Hungary
Some Hungarian experts compare the loss of the Russian market in the 1990-ies with the losses suffered by the country after the Trianon Treaty.
Twenty years after the disintegration of the USSR the attempts to reevaluate the role of the Soviet ...
