Russia in the Balkans. Threat or Opportunity?

Issue editor: Jan Muś

ISSN: 1732-1395

e-ISSN: 2719-2911

Number of pages: 162

Publisher: Instytut Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej

Edition: Lublin 2015

Articles

Article

Russia’s State-Owned Companies and Contemporary Bulgarian Political and Economic Landscape (en translation)

Views count: 1485
The paper represents and attempt to link energy projects of government companies of the Russian Federation with nowadays Bulgaria’s political and economic environment. It focuses on the last ten years and gives deeper historical background (e.g. Bulgaria defaults on its foreign debt to Soviet banks, nuclear projects of the Communist era, etc.) only when relevant for the understanding of the contemporary situation. The first section of the paper summarizes a 2002-2015 energy project in its controversial policy environment. The second section explains the impacts on Bulgarian power sector policies, especially delays in its liberalisation, controversies around EU policies related to renewable energy and environment policies, plus public and political attitudes towards FDI’s and energy resources. The power sector policies have had negative side-effects on the country’s banking sector, a bank run and a bankruptcy of one bank in 2014; this experience is reviewed in the third section of the paper. The forth part describes the impacts on Bulgaria’s political establishment in 2007-2014, and attempts, instead of conclusion, a description of peculiarities of the contemporary Russia-Bulgaria controversies. The paper uses several documents and sources that are almost unknown to the international audience.

Article

A Different Perspective? Russian Interpretation of the International Law in the Post-Cold War Era (en translation)

Views count: 879
Despite the fact that both the US and the USSR systematically violated the international law and more specifically Art. 2 § 4 during the Cold War period, the attitude of the Russian Federation, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, changed towards the latter becoming a “champion” of the international law, slamming the West in cases of unilateral actions that constituted violations of the international law, with Kosovo being the most characteristic case. However, as Russia grew stronger it started itself acting according to its wider interests totally disregarding the international law (South Ossetia, Abkhazia – 2008, and Crimea – 2014) being the most characteristic cases. The article investigates into this behaviour and tries to draw conclusions regarding the future conduct of the Russian Federation vis-à-vis fundamental principles of the international law.