The European Union’s looming enlargement eastwards ran up against its first big external obstacle last week when Moscow and Brussels were deadlocked on how to deal with a Russian pocket, which will be locked territorially inside the expanded union.
After 15 months of hard bargaining, a Russia-EU summit in Moscow disagreed fundamentally on freedom of movement for the 900 000 people of the Kaliningrad enclave when its neighbours, Lithuania and Poland, join the EU and end visa-free travel for Russians crossing their territory. Kaliningrad is bordered by the members-to-be and the Baltic sea.
Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that the issue was one of principle and would determine the future of relations with Brussels.
But with immigration the hottest political topic in Western Europe, the European Commission made it plain that Brussels would not relax its insistence on introducing EU visas for Russians travelling to and from Kaliningrad via Lithuania or Poland.
Putin described the EU proposals as an affront to the ”civilised community. We don’t have the right not to observe fundamental human rights there.” He was speaking after meeting the commission president, Romano Prodi, and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, the current EU president.
An EU source said: ”There will have to be some movement, but that will have to come from the Russian side.”