EU and Russia resume treaty talks
Senior EU and Russian officials will on Tuesday (2 December) resume talks on a new treaty in Brussels, with the simmering conflict in Georgia low on the agenda.
Russian ambassador to the EU Vladimir Chizhov will meet the European Commission's top external relations official, Eneko Landaburu, for a "plenary" session of negotiations on a new "Strategic Partnership Treaty."
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The treaty talks are set to take years, with Tuesday's event to debate banal issues and coming after more than 20 EU-Russia meetings in other formats under the French EU presidency.
"The talks will pick up where they left off in July, which is setting the long term agenda for the future [negotiations]," European Commission spokesperson Christiane Hohmann said.
"It's not business as usual. Let's hope it's better than business as usual," Russia's Vladimir Chizhov told EUobserver. "Russia and the EU are so interdependent that they cannot afford to stop business at any moment. Business goes on even at times of crisis."
Tuesday's meeting also marks a new chapter in EU-Russia relations after the Georgia war, however.
The EU froze the talks in reaction to Russia's invasion of Georgia and is re-starting them despite Russia's non-compliance with an EU-brokered peace accord, in what Lithuania has called an "historic mistake."
Around 10,000 Russian forces remain in Georgia, some as close as 40 km from the capital Tbilisi. EU and OSCE monitors are denied access to the rebel-held Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions, with 11 Georgian policemen having been killed and nine wounded since hostilities officially ended.
"My government was of the opinion that restarting the talks was not the best idea," Georgia's EU ambassador, Salome Samadashvili, told this website.
"But what's important is that the EU remains committed to implementing the ceasefire agreement and to getting international access to these regions, as these are the only ways to ensure security. If the EU backed off from these promises, it would be a betrayal."
Energy security
The main thrust of the new EU-Russia treaty will be to create a legal framework for EU energy companies to invest safely in Russia, after Russia ditched a previous pact - the 1994 Energy Charter Treaty - on the same subject.
The European Commission sees Russia as a vital supplier of natural gas, but is concerned about lack of investment in new gas fields and old pipelines, as well as expanding domestic demand and inefficiency of use in Russia itself.
"We both need this treaty. The EU no less than Russia," Mr Chizhov said.
Hard security
On the hard security front, Tuesday will also see NATO foreign ministers in Brussels discuss resuming normal contacts with Moscow.
"There were some low-level contacts with Russia, but no NATO-Russia Council following the August war," NATO policy planning director Jamie Shea said at a German Marshall Fund seminar on Monday.
"These mechanisms are based on a set of values, principles and mutual obligations," he added. "NATO wouldn't be NATO anymore if it simply disregarded instances where these obligations are not met."