Cyrill Vatomsky, Where All Politics Are Global

It seems that the only agreement Condoleezza Rice and Vladimir Putin could come up to is to tone down rhetoric in public. According to RIA Novosti:

Meanwhile, this is not the only front where no agreement or even no progress had been achieved. According to business newspaper Vzglyad (Outlook, link in Russian) European  Union is not ready to start the next round of negotiations on the future framework of Russian-EU relationships. The upcoming Samara summit of foreign ministers
was going to kick off negotiations that are still being put on hold because of firm opposition from Poland and now Lithuania and Estonia. Poland wants Russia to lift meat imports embargo it imposed when Poland violated EU rules and tried to ship meat products purchased in third countries. As has been mentioned sometime earlier on the Embassy of the New World order radio, Lithuania claims that Russia is deliberately squeezing a Lithuanian refinery by cutting supplies. The general suspicion has been for a while that Russia would like to depress the value of the refinery and then purchase it for pennies.

According to Vzglyad Estonian foreign minister accused Russia of imposing unofficial sanctions against Tallinn.

The only way for Russia would be to drive a wedge between the Old Europe and the Eastern European newcomers to the Union. Vzglyad quotes Dmitry Orlov a political analyst as suggesting that EU made a mistake by expanding so fast and that the newcomer countries do not yet feel adequate responsibility for continent-wide issues. The implication of course is that Russia is mature enough to adequately feel that responsibility recent hysteria notwithstanding.

Unfortunately, Estonians are not helping their cause either. The same Vzglyad reports that deputy speaker of the Estonian Parliament called to ban broadcasts of Russian TV channels in Estonia. Someone pick up a phone and tell Kristina Ojuland that freedom of speech either exists or it does not. Obviously, Estonia is a European country and Europeans do not hold freedom of speech in the same respect as the US does - banning speech is normal in Europe, so maybe it is not that big a deal.

Once again I ask the question of purpose. Those roadblocks that Russia seems to be encountering in the West - are they hurting her, are they of her own doing or does she really care as long as she can bring progress in the East by announcing a complex deal to build a Near Caspian pipeline?