beyondukraine.euandrussiainsearchofanewrelation

8 Beyond Ukraine. EU and Russia in Search of a New Relation
undisputable Russia’s influence. To this aim and with the view to
highlighting the goodwill of the Russian government to enhance
cooperation with the European Union as a pro-active and equal
partner, some important steps were taken including the Bologna
process (implemented by Russia in 2007), visa liberalization for
some categories of Russian citizens, Partnership for
Modernization (promoting EU-Russia technological scientific
exchange) and, to some extent, energy security cooperation.
However, this strategy proved to be short-lived. Clearly Russia
overestimated its ability to convince its European partners to share
the same path – on equal footing – to build a common economic
and security architecture. Sooner than expected, political
divergences and vital interests emerged. As a result, the Greater
Europe project was progressively frozen, if not plainly abandoned.
As of 2012, Russia started to actively promote its “turn towards
Asia”, or simply put towards China, which is, at the same time,
both a key partner and a major challenge for Moscow. So it comes
as no surprise that the Eurasian project started to rank high in
Russia’s foreign policy. The Ukrainian crisis made this trend
crystal clear, and inevitably led to Russia’s isolation from the
West, which, in turn, ignited a strong anti-Western stance, shared
by the vast majority of the population, also thanks to the effective
state propaganda.
To make things worse, the Kiev protests that broke out in
autumn 2013 further aggravated Russia-EU misunderstandings,
with the risk of completely compromising 25 years of efforts by
both sides. Indeed, this showed how weak such efforts had always
been as the EU-Russia dialogue had never really taken off and
never achieved high-level and concrete results.
Against this background, it goes without saying that Moscow
has always perceived the EU-NATO expansion with hostility. By
the same token, the EU has regarded with suspicion any form of
economic and political integration between Russia and post-Soviet
countries, reading such initiatives as Moscow’s clear attempt to restart
an imperialist project. Ukraine has thus become the main