Yesterday on Foreign Policy Christian Caryl published one of those "Russia-more-isolated-now-than-ever-thanks-to-their-own-policies-of-confrontation" type of articles.  We are beginning to see this topic come around and around ever since the Ukraine smackdown, but the trend has been building over the past number of years - I would say well before the war with Georgia.  What I like about Caryl's piece is that he points out that it certainly doesn't have to be this way, and that Russia's missteps with its neighbors could be easily corrected should the leadership ever get it right.

Russia's ability to get in its own way remains a cause for much head-scratching in the region. "When they tried to stop NATO enlargement, whom did they discuss it with? The United States and Germany," notes Kadri Liik, Director of the International Center for Defense Studies in Tallinn, Estonia. "But in fact

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TODAY: Russia condemns North Korea 'Hiroshima' size bomb test; Lavrov says election result in Lebanon must be respected; Medvedev believes influence in CIS states should be extended; streamlining the military provokes discontentA spokesman for President Medvedev has said that 'North Korea's underground nuclear test in the region adjacent to the territory of the Russian Federation ... causes deep regret and the most serious concern'.  The detonation was, according to Russian experts, of a bomb roughly the same size as that dropped on Nagasaki or Hiroshima.  Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said that the international community must recognize the results of Lebanon's upcoming general election, regardless of who wins.  This comment comes hot on the heels of those by US Vice President ...

I came across this translation from the Latvian press on TOL about whether or not the global financial crisis is changing Russia's foreign policy ambitions in its near abroad.  The short answer: no.You would think that given this increasingly complex domestic situation, Russia's rulers would not have the time or money to continue the aggressive foreign policies which they have pursued in recent years - those which culminated in August 2008 with the war against Georgia. But let us not fool ourselves. There are two reasons why the crisis is strengthening, not weakening Russia's desire to continue on its way with its decided foreign policy course. First there was something that was stressed at the Tallinn conference by many long-term ...

by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /blockquoteJoke - How do you know when a country is in crisis? Well, on the buses on the way to work, and in the bars and cafes during the mid morning break, everyone is reading the economy rather than the sports section in the local newspaper./blockquoteSeveral pieces of news out over the last week are relevant to the whole debate we are having about how to drag the Estonian economy (kicking and screaming it would seem) out of its current slump. In the first place the Estonian parliament passed a supplementary 2009 budget at the start of the week, in an attempt to address the ongoing crisis in the economy and the dramatic decline in revenues. The cuts were approved by 61 votes to 35 against in what was also an effective vote of confidence in the present government. So at least it is clear ...

by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /Well, there doesn't seem to much room for doubt at this point does there, the Baltic Economies are in the van of the European economic slowdown for 2009, just as they were leading the charge up in 2007, and all that debate about whether we were going to get a hard landing or a soft one seems now so out of date and and old hat as we watch how Estonia's economy contracts almost faster than the body of the incredible shrinking man (by an annual 3.5% in the third quarter of 2008), while Latvia's seems to be rivalling Harry Houdini in the expert art of staged disappearance (dropping as it did by an annual 4.6% in Q3). Even Lithuania's economy - which like a half drunken man still manages to stagger forward before it finally gets to fall over - is now expected by ...

The Estonian recession continues to deepen, month by month. The most recent evidence comes to us in the form of a decline in both Estonian retail sales and industrial production, which fell in each case for the fifth consecutive month in September, leading us to expect the rate of GDP contraction to accelerate further in Q3.

Retail Sales Fall An Annual 8%Retail sales, excluding cars and fuel, fell by an annual 8 percent in August, the largest such decline registered since at least 2001. This follows a 6 percent in August. The year on year chart (see below) couldn't be clearer.Sales were also down month on month (ie with respect to August), this time by a non seasonally adjusted 7%. In fact, on a seasonally adjusted basis retail sales peaked in February 2008, and have been trending down

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The AFP is reporting today that eleven people have been arrested in a criminal operation to smuggle vodka via an underwater pipeline from Russia to Estonia. Though certainly a lucrative black market trade, it doesn't look like they were sending the good stuff: According to prosecutors the men had pumped at least 6,200 litres of illegal spirit to Estonia, avoiding paying 57,000 euros (900,000 Estonian Crowns) in excise duty. "The investigation also revealed that the men had tried to sell some of the alcohol in Tallinn in early November 2004 but the quality of the spirit was too bad and no buyers were found. They then transported their cargo back to Narva and later managed to sell it in Tartu, the second largest town in Estonia," Luuk said. And here all along we thought that Gazprom wasn't a dynamic company ... As least they ...