"Serbia is Russia's pain threshold"

"Serbia is Russia's pain threshold"

"Why the West and Russia cannot agree on a common security policy? Because Putin does not care about borders but about spheres of influence," Michael Thumann writes in a commentary published on the weekly's website.

Commenting on the recent NATO summit, Thumann said that some observers from Moscow "rejoiced in the shards that the US president left in Brussels," but that "malice mixed with disappointment because Donald Trump also spoke about the Russian threat." It seems that the Russians have reconciled with the fact that bad relations with the West are a constant, said the article.

The author wonders why the Russians are not making more effort when it comes to the Europeans, citing as an example a meeting of senior officials of the EU and Russia in St. Petersburg at the end of May, "where there was at least an attempt to talk."

"But these efforts were generally not sufficient. Among other things, this is because after five minutes, the discussion always gets stuck in the undergrowth of recent history - the expansion of NATO, the Kosovo war in 1999, EU's enlargement, the war between Russia and Ukraine in 2014. They will not agree about these things for a along time. But if the conflict were not much more fundamental, they would not have to," thinks the author.

In his view, both sides want inviolability of borders and security for all, "but trouble is, they mean completely different things by that."

"When Europeans speak about safe borders, they mean that one cannot simply march into a neighboring country such as Russian troops did in 2014 in Ukraine. That one cannot annex somebody else's territory such as Russia did with Crimea. When the Russian government talks about safe borders, it means that alliances of states - like NATO and the EU - must not expand. That relations of power and influence must not moved. Europeans talk about states and borders, Russians talk about spheres of influence."

Russia's "pain threshold," continues the article, ends hundreds of kilometers west of the Russian state border.

"It ends at the western borders of Belarus and Ukraine. It ends at the borders of Serbia, which, in the view of Russian politicians, should never become a part of NATO or the EU. The confusion about pain thresholds and national boundaries, and insistence on spheres of influence today prevents the EU and Russia moving closer. For that reason, Moscow cannon profit from the friction between Trump and the EU," concludes the article.