US Wants to Squeeze Russia Out of Europe – French Analyst

Is Russia part of Europe or not? This is the question which has split western public opinion and formed the current geopolitical agenda, Arnaud Dubien, Director of the Observo Franco-Russian Analytical Center, wrote in the opening part of the center’s annual report.

"This great divide runs between those who believe that Europe ends in eastern Ukraine, and those who argue that, despite all crises and upheavals, Russia, too, is part of the European community of nations," Dubien wrote.

What the former are really after is to push Russia back and keep it on the farthest possible fringes of Eurasia. This is something the US readily subscribed to in the mid-1990s and is fully shared by NATO, the European Commission, the majority of MEPs, and also by Britain, Sweden, the Baltics and Poland, Dubien added.

"As for France and the other founding members of the EU, they are holding out for a single European area on the continent," he emphasized.

This opinion is fully echoed by Konstantin Kosachev, who heads  the Foreign Affairs committee at the Federation Council, the  upper house of the Russian parliament.

"All we need to do now is to persuade the EU’s founding nations to stop kowtowing to Washington and become a self-sufficient geopolitical project together with Russia… Who knows, maybe the Americans will then change their mind and join in too," Kosachev wrote on his Facebook page.