...powerfully sexy

Many governments are skeptical that the sanctions agaist Russia could actually get Putin to back down. In German security policy circles, that outcome is considered almost impossible. The thumbscrews the West has thus far implemented "haven't instilled much fear" in Putin and his associates, one security official argued. Russia has little foreign debt and large currency reserves, giving it a transitional period of at least two years -- enough time to find new buyers and distribution routes for Russian gas. "We'll be sitting in the cold before the Russians run out of money," says one security official.

Putin's determination to secure his influence over eastern Ukraine is also related to the region's importance to the Russian armaments industry. The Russian army's airplane motors, gear boxes and rocket equipment are, according to Western knowledge, in large part built in eastern Ukraine. That's why the Kremlin has also, according to the security official, planned painful economic sanctions of its own. "If the Russian leadership sees itself as strong, even if we don't see it that way, then it will also act strong -- and at the moment it feels very strong."

Although the 28 EU member states try hard to project a sense of unity to the outside world, their differences in opinion make themselves felt in internal meetings. Merkel is afraid that, in the end, the Union's disunity could spill into the open and Putin would have accomplished one of his important goals, dividing the Europeans.

Looking for Ways to Avoid the Issue - That's another reason why the German government wants to avoid, at all cost, a situation in which sanctions are unavoidable. Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has pointed out that Moscow has recently stopped questioning the legitimacy of the Ukrainian presidential elections, which are planned for May 25. The German government is grasping for these kinds of signals, because they may serve as a reason not to implement the third level of sanctions.

Before concrete steps can be defined, the EU also needs to discuss when the third level should even be implemented -- a way to skirt the delicate situation. "Clearly there will be economic sanctions if Putin sabotages the vote," says a high-ranking government official. "But it's unclear what would constitute sabotage."

One way to at least defer the debate around sanctions would be to push the Ukrainians to delay the vote. But the German government does not want that at all, because it would seem like a capitulation to Putin. "A delay isn't in our script," Markus Ederer, a state secretary in Steinmeier's Foreign Ministry, stated last Wednesday during a session of the German parliament's foreign affairs committee.

House prices in Britain are around 30pc too high, according to a study published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development.

The figures, included in a wider report on economic prospects, offer a signal as to where buyers might be able to find a property bargain – and the nations where they may be overpaying.

Commonwealth countries, in particular, were found to have the most wildly overvalued property markets among the OECD countries. They include New Zealand, Australia and Canada; prices continued to power ahead in all three last year.

Closer to home, prices in France and Norway remain too high, the report indicated. In contrast, property markets in Ireland, Portugal and Germany are undervalued.

Japan, where prices have been in an on-off 25-year decline, remains the cheapest market within the OECD. Despite an unprecedented stimulus programme deployed last year by Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, prices fell in real terms by nearly 2pc in 2013. The wonders that so-called “Abenomics” worked in creating inflation and sending Tokyo shares soaring failed to work on bricks and mortar.(source telegraph.uk)

Voters’ resentment suggests that giving the European Parliament more power has not been a reliable route to democratic legitimacy. The parliament has failed in its 35-year strategy of persuading voters to take it seriously by winning an ever growing role.  Europe’s heads of government should stand against its latest power grab, which is to arrogate to itself the right to choose the next European Commission president by getting the main political groups to nominate candidates and refusing to accept any alternative.

If the EU is to gain democratic legitimacy, it will do so not through the European Parliament but through national parliaments. That means giving powers back to them wherever possible, including greater fiscal flexibility and more national control over social policy and employment rules. It also means that national leaders must take responsibility for economic reform, rather than hiding behind the convenient fiction that painful choices are being forced on them by bad people in Brussels or Berlin. Recent experience shows that those who do so can benefit: countries which have made deeper changes at home, such as Spain and Portugal, are now bouncing back more strongly than reform laggards like France and Italy.

At one time Europe seemed to be moving inexorably towards “ever closer union”—and many federalists hoped the euro crisis, like previous crises, would mean another leap forwards. Yet in the wasteland left after the crisis, voters are shaking their pitchforks at the notion of a United States of Europe. Rather than seek to expand the role of the EU’s institutions, it would be better to reinforce the nation-states where legitimacy lies. Europe’s broad strategic direction should be set by heads of government, not by the European Commission, even though that body proposes the detailed laws. The European Parliament should be downgraded, with more democratic control given to national parliaments. If the EU is to survive, it must hand powers back to the people. The European Central Bank could ease monetary policy, including by unconventional means. The European Commission could make a renewed push at completing the single market in services, digital technology and energy, for instance, or could press ahead with a free-trade deal with America,but, a blast of reformist zeal from Brussels would hardly mollify Europe’s disgruntled voters. For one thing, reforms tend to produce short-term pain before long-term gain—one reason why many European governments have found them so hard. For another, voters do not like being pushed around by Eurocrats.

The battle to save the euro has led to the centralisation of powers over banking, taxing and spending; and, while most euro-zone voters want to keep the euro, they have made it quite clear that they oppose the accretion of ever more intrusive powers to the ECB, the European Commission and the European Parliament. The EU’s abandoned constitution and its successor, the Lisbon treaty, were together rejected in three out of six referendums; ten governments broke promises rather than hold votes on the final version. In France, a founding member, the EU today attracts even more resentment than it does in famously Eurosceptic Britain. The populists’ appeal in the European elections is based largely on rising hostility to interference by Brussels.

This is an issue of democracy, not of economics. Voters are not impressed when they toss out an incumbent government only to be told by the EU that its replacement must stick to the same fiscal rules and economic policies. Since the transfer of powers to the centre has come about as a result of economic failure, and not of broader political debate or of resounding success, the chances of its being meekly accepted are slim.

Ukraine needs a government of national unity that reaches out to its own people and tackles the country’s long overdue reforms; both Russia and Western powers should back a vision for the country as a bridge between East and West, not a geopolitical battleground.

In its latest report, Ukraine: Running out of Time, the International Crisis Group analyses instability in Ukraine on the eve of the 25 May presidential election and offers recommendations to rebuild and reform the country and reverse the geopolitical standoff it has provoked. The Kyiv government has been unable to assert itself or communicate coherently and appears to have lost control of parts of the country to separatists, emboldened if not backed by Russia. To prevent further escalation, Ukraine needs strong international assistance and the commitment of all sides to a so lution through dialogue, not force.

The report’s major findings and recommendations are:

 

• Although conditions for the election are far from ideal, it must take place as planned and nationwide. The vote is needed to produce a new leader with a popular mandate to steer the country through a process of national reconciliation and economic reform. All presidential candidates should, before the polls, commit to establish a broad-based government of national unity; the new president’s first priority must be to form such a government.
  
• Ukrainian leaders should reach out immediately to the south and east and explain plans for local self-government and minority rights; they should also declare that they do not desire NATO membership.
  
• Ukraine’s damage goes far beyond separatism. It is the fruit of decades of mismanagement and corruption across security organs and most other arms of government. Far-reaching reform of the security sector and measures to strengthen the rule of law are crucial.
  
• Russia should declare unqualified support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity and withdraw all troops from the borders, as well as any paramilitaries who have infiltrated from Crimea or elsewhere. It should persuade Russian speakers in the south and east to end their occupations of government buildings and attacks on local security apparatuses and disband their militias.
  
• The U.S. and EU need to convey a consistent and measured message, recognising – even if not accepting – Moscow’s take on the crisis’s origins. This message should comprise political support for Kyiv to conduct elections; political, financial and expert support for a national unity government to carry out stabilisation measures; measures to make Ukraine viable for investors; further sanctions to bite deeper into Russia’s economy if it does not change course; and quiet high-level talks with Moscow aimed at resolving the crisis.
  
• Both Moscow and Western powers should emphasise that the present situation can only be resolved by diplomatic means; express support for a post-election government of national unity; take all possible measures to avoid geopolitical confrontation; and insulate other mutual concerns from divisions over Ukraine.

“On the ground in Ukraine today, Russia has immediate advantages of escalation” says Paul Quinn-Judge, Europe and Central Asia Program Director. “Over time, the West likely has the economic and soft-power edge. A successful, democratic Ukraine – integrated economically in the West but outside military alliances, and remaining a close cultural, linguistic and trading partner of Russia – would benefit all”.

The european project is reducing the middle classes to subsistence wages. The whole deal on integration has made many in the EU much richer and many much poorer and a few very very wealthy. Guess whose making up the rules. Who never have had an audit on accounts passed.

Competing with the globe was one thing for exports and manufacturing, competing with some of the poorest individuals for work,housing, hospital care and schooling. Was not the EU we voted for........!

Apart from EU geeks and insiders who cares if its Juncker or Schullz ? Lib Lab con dont , they care about 2015 instead and rightly so.

Re arranging the EU deck chairs is missing the point . With rise of pro democracy parties througout Europe to challenge the anti democracy creed of ever closer union its time to design what comes after the EU an association of free nations with visible open national parliaments accountable to the people with only recommendations ... not laws coming from Brussels of whatever.

Mass open door immigration , deeply and multi aspect damaging to the people in UK but beloved by big business and EU federalists is the tipping point of public anger at the political elite, EU , and political consensus. the wave of anti democracy bigotry and demonisation coming from authoritarians outraged at the pleb revolt and how they vote and will vote in may is damaging not helping the pro Eu cause.

We live in interesting times with the healthy prospect being replacing the unacountable grey EU figures by more visible more direct and more accountable national democracy....More vacant tired pro European rhetoric. You talk of dialogue, dialogue and more bloody dialogue, how long has "Europe" been in 'dialogue' with the monstrous leviathan that is the inept body EU? All that 'dialogue' and we are still bitter and resentful at EU scaremongering, corruption and inefficiency. No more bloody dialogue, an end to dialogue, a start for action, via votes that disengage the mechanism of 'dialogue'. Dialogue is what the brixlles delapidators incorporated would have us doing unto the void. When did talking about action become more esteemed than ACTUAL action, when did promising to promise, become more valid than fulfilling that promise? No more dialogue, we simply and loudly demand more freedom to behave as independent states, less 'dialogue' about what those freedoms may entail.

MOSCOW, May 13 (RIA Novosti) – Peace activists in Rome have gathered to demonstrate against the EU’s support of the authorities in Kiev, Italian antiwar activist Marinella Correggia from the No-War Network told RIA Novosti Tuesday.

“We will stage this demonstration in front of European Union’s representation in downtown Rome, protesting against the support that the European Union is giving to the putschist government in Kiev and the fact that they ignore the atrocities which were made by the neo-Nazist groups which are in the government of Kiev,” Correggia said over the phone.

“We are also protesting against the double standards – Kosovo was born after the NATO bombings and that is very much OK for the EU and it is recognized as an independent country. When it is Crimea or Eastern Ukraine with not the war but a referendum, the EU and the US, and of course NATO, they say it is illegal, criminal,” Correggia told RIA Novosti.

The demonstration will unite Italian peace and anti-fascist organizations which, according to Marinella Correggia, have been silent for years. Thus she doesn’t expect many people this time, though the next demonstration scheduled for May 17 could attract thousands of people.

A similar demonstration was held last Friday in Naples.

Valdai Club expert and Director of the Center for Political Information Alexei Mukhin argues that the independence movements in Ukraine’s Donetsk and the Lugansk regions are a bad sign for the authorities in Kiev, underscoring their lack of control over the situation in the country.
"The use of the Ukrainian military to decide domestic political conflicts is evidence that the sociopolitical system in Ukraine is seriously ill,” Mukhin says. “The question is, who will treat this political malady? It is already clear that the May 25 elections will not do any good, as part of the country has seceded and residents of other parts are unlikely to vote.”
Mukhin believes Russia has chosen the best course of action by staying out of the internal affairs of what remains for now a sovereign state, in contrast to the external powers currently seeking to turn Ukraine into a puppet state. The State Department and top US intelligence officials don’t hide their plans for Ukraine, which is losing the contours of a sovereign state. But Mukhin points out that many in the Western world have realized that Ukraine comes with enormous political and economic baggage that European countries would have to bear. This resulted in a split in Western society, with public opinion in the EU and the United States turning against President Barack Obama and his European allies running the operation in Ukraine.
"The independence referendums held by two southeastern regions of Ukraine are acts of self-defense that their people are entitled to take under the Constitution of Ukraine,” Mukhin argues. “Questioning the legitimacy of these referendums calls into question any and all official actions taken in Ukraine, and Kiev knows it. Most importantly, these events should be approached carefully. We should wait for the results and only then develop a mechanism for political decision-making.”
The expert also noted how important it is that political entities now exist in southeastern Ukraine. Kiev won’t be able to ignore their representatives, and there are no longer any grounds for excluding them from the contact group that everyone except the United States is discussing. When the contact group is formed in the near future, the situation in Ukraine will be brought back into a legal framework with the help of the UN Security Council.
Mukhin believes there is some truth in the claim that Ukraine has become personal for Obama – a matter of envy for another world leader. Throughout 2013, the US media was fixated on Obama’s plummeting approval ratings. Meanwhile Putin’s popularity and political influence in the world was on the rise. The US president could not help feeling resentful, but ultimately Obama’s policy in Ukraine is grounded in more pragmatic concerns.
“Obama has only two years before his second term is over, and he wants to leave behind something more meaningful than the pitiful legacy of George W. Bush,” Mukhin says. “Perhaps he wants to make Europe the main market for the US energy exports. There was a lot of talk about that at the outset of the crisis in Ukraine, when the US offered to replace an unreliable Russia as Europe’s main energy supplier.”
Of course, the United States has sought to play down the fact that energy prices will be much higher due to transportation costs and economic risks. Mukhin believes Europe’s growing economic dependence on the United States will be exacerbated by increased EU military commitments, as the US offer implies the deployment of additional military bases and missile defense units in Europe. While such arguments have not garnered much attention in Europe, Mukhin is confident that they are accurately reflect US intentions.
Alexei Mukhin shared these and other thoughts during his talk at the roundtable, The Current Situation in Ukraine: A Bloody Ten Days in May, held at the Rossiya Segodnya press center on May 12.