Eastern Europe: Between hammer and anvil

Despite the many changes in eastern Europe in recent decades, Russia and Germany still fail to see the countries in between — Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine — as little more than geopolitical nuisances.

For Russia, Poles were and are an annoyance — as former president and prime minister Dmitri Medvedev recently made clear. Belarusians are a joke — as Russia's creeping annexation of their country suggests. And Ukrainians are delusional fa...