It's official - Russia has pulled out of Eurovision

For the first time since the country entered the song contest in 1994, Russia will not broadcast the event. Will they ever come back? Or will they launch their own 'illiberal' Eurovision alternative?

After weeks of protracted negotiations, the organiser of the Eurovision Song Contest announced the news everyone expected: Russia will not participate in this year's competition.

The big question now becomes - will they ever come back?

Eurovision is hugely popular in Russia, and the loss of this significant audience is a big blow to the European Broadcasting Union, the coalition of national broadcasters that stages the contest. What is terrifying for the EBU is the prospect that Russia will now permanently pull out of the contest. 

Russian politicians have been calling for it to do so for years, ever since a bearded drag queen named Conchita Wurst won for Austria in 2014. One Russian MP said the contest had become 'a celebration of perversion', and said Moscow should revive the old Cold War alternative, Intervision, as a family-friendly alternative.

Russia just won the Eurovision propaganda war

Ukraine’s decision to ban Russia's Eurovision contestant from entering the country makes Kiev look like the bad guy. Once again, Moscow has outmaneuvered its enemies.

Eurovision, the annual contest in which European nations compete against one another to produce the best song, has been no stranger to political controversies over its 60 years. But nothing compares to what is now unfolding in Kiev.

This year, the song contest has become entangled in today's most controversial and beguiling geopolitical conflict - Russia's 2014 invasion and annexation of Crimea.

The stage was set last May, when Ukrainian contestant Jamala scored a shock win in the 2016 contest with a song about Crimea. It wasn't explicitly about the current conflict. Instead, it was an emotionally intense song about the Soviet Union's mass deportations of Crimean Tatars to Siberia in 1944.

Europe's 2017 elections are turning into referendums on Trump

Feelings of nationalism are running strong in France, but anti-Americanism may be stronger.

Three years ago, when a former investment banker named Emmanuel Macron was appointed as interior minister in the French government, nobody had ever heard of him. 

Today, he has come out of nowhere to second place in the French presidential election. It looks increasingly likely that he will be in a head-to-head with French far-right leader Marine Le Pen in May's second round of voting. More than anything else, there is one element that explains his meteoric rise: he is presenting himself as the anti-Trump.

His candidacy comes at a time when many in France, and indeed the entire European continent, are terrified that the French presidency will be snatched by Le Pen's far-right National Front - a party with anti-Semitic routes from the ashes of the Second World War. Were Le Pen to win, it would not only have implications for France. It would probably mean the collapse of the European Union, or at least its transformation into an irrelevance.

Could the US have a military coup?

The military is the only American institution left with public trust, and that trust is enormous. As a new era dawns, the previously unthinkable is on the table.

Each year, I come home to the United States for an extended break over the Christmas holiday. Ordinarily it’s a time to relax, recharge, and spend some quality time with family. But this year a dark cloud is hanging over my visit.

I’m from the New York area, so it’s no surprise that people here are still feeling a sense of shell shock about November’s election result. But this isn’t the same disappointment people felt during the George W era. This isn’t about politics. There is a palpable sense of anxiety and fear in the air. Nobody knows what’s coming next.

There is a sense that everything people thought they knew about their own country has suddenly evaporated. More than one person has described the feeling as being one of a “living nightmare” that they still expect to wake up from. Someone else told me that the sudden shock of having the world you thought you knew come tumbling to the ground gave him “the same feeling as on September 11th”.

As America votes, Europe holds its breath

Once again, Europeans wait while 300 million people on another continent determine their future. Why do they accept this state of affairs?

If you think things are tense in the United States right now, you should try it here in Central and Eastern Europe. 

People are incredibly anxious about what might happen on 8 November. There are the obvious concerns - a volatile and unpredictable man being given access to America's nuclear arsenal after a victory sending global markets into freefall. In an age when America is still the bedrock of the global military and economic order, such an earthquake would send shockwaves throughout the world.

These are the worries of the whole globe right now. But in Europe, they have additional reason to fear. No area of the world is more dependent on the United States for its peace and prosperity than Europe. And it is this dependence that makes the media's coverage of US presidential elections here so breathless. In many ways, Europeans devote more attention to the American election than they do their own.

Russia's '1936 games'?

Relations between the United States and Russia seemed to hit a post-cold-war low this week when president Barack Obama cancelled a bilateral meeting with Vladimir Putin ahead of next month's G20 summit in St. Petersburg.

 After years of tension over Syria, missile defense and human rights, Russia's decision to grant asylum to NSA leaker Edward Snowdon was the straw that broke the camel's back. But the real low point in relations may have come during an appearance this week by the US president on America's most watched comedy show.

 During an interview on The Tonight Show on Tuesday (6 August), the US president sat impassively as the show's long-time host Jay Leno compared the Russian regime to the Nazis and Vladimir Putin to Hitler. Leno was referring specifically to Russia's recent passage of a law banning the ‘promotion' of homosexuality and an accompanying rise of gruesome vigilante attacks on Russian gays by far-right groups.

Putin suggests an EU-Russia union

Should Russia and the EU link up in a "common continental market?" Vladimir Putin thinks so. The Russian prime minister made the case for such a union in an editorial appearing in a German newspaper yesterday ahead of a two-day visit to Germany. But German Chancellor Angela Merkel quickly made her feelings on the subject known. Asked about Putin's editorial at a press conference yesterday she said she would have to "pour cold water" on the idea when she meets with Mr. Putin, though she said an EU-Russia free trade zone is a possibility.

The idea of a pan-European free trade zone, similar to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) struck in the 1990's, has been floated for some time. But Putin's editorial seems to go further than this. "We propose the creation of a harmonious economic community stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok," he wrote. "The result would be a unified continental market with a capacity worth trillions of euros." He said "the global economic crisis has revealed both Russia and the EU to be economically very vulnerable," adding that Russia is too dependent on its oil and gas exports while the EU is too dependant on imports, and the EU has lost its competitive edge because of de-industrialisation. Linking the two economies, Putin wrote, could solve problems on both sides.

The Kaliningrad Question

Having written an in-depth article on Russia's Kaliningrad oblast for an article I was working on back in 2002, I'm always interested when the territory makes its way into the news. Most people don't even know of the existence of this strange corner of the earth, but judging from Russian President Medvedev's state of the union speech last week, it could feature very prominently in relations between Russia, the US and Europe over the next decade.

Russia didn't waste any time testing Obama's mettle, with President Dmitry Medvedev delivering a speech the day after the historic election lambasting the United States for provoking the Georgian conflict, leading the world into economic disaster, and threatening Russia with its missile defense system it is installing in Poland and the Czech Republic. These complaints aren't new, but on the last point President Medvedev matched actions to words, saying Russia would install short-range missiles just off the Polish border in its territory of Kaliningrad, in response to the US "provocation." If Russia were to carry out this threat, it could provoke a new Cuban missile crisis for the EU and the new US president Obama. A spokesperson for Obama said today that the president-elect hasn't yet made a decision on whether to continue the Bush Administration's plans for the missile defense system.

So I think this is big news, but coming as it did after Obama's historic election, its been largely overshadowed. Additionally, I've been struck by some of the basic points the media seems to be missing with this news. For one, they keep referring to Kaliningrad as an "enclave" of Russia, when in fact it is an exclave (a territory is an enclave of a country it is completely surrounded by, it is an exclave of the country it belongs to). This may seem like a trivial semantic difference, but by failing to highlight the fact that Kaliningrad is an exclave of Russia it seems to me the media is missing the point. When they refer to the territory as being "on the border of Lithuania and Poland" they fail to mention that it is surrounded by those countries, which are both now in the EU. That means the Russian territory of Kaliningrad is located within the EU. It would be as if Russia owned the US state of Connecticut and was going to install missiles there. Keep in mind this is no insignificant territory, being larger than Connecticut and located on the strategically important Baltic Sea.

So why does Russia have this territory anyway? It's actually a peculiar accident of history and I think an incredibly sad one. The city of Kaliningrad was until the 1950s a German city named Konigsberg. The entire area was settled by crusading Germans in the 13th century and became the kingdom of Prussia. It was actually the nucleus of what eventually became Germany, with the capital of the growing German Empire only moving from Konigsberg to Berlin in the 18th century. However after World War I, with the re-creation of a Polish state, the allied powers decided that the new country needed access to the Baltic Sea, so they created a "Polish Corridor" cutting through Germany, separating East Prussia from the rest of the German state. One of Hitler's main initial aims was to retake Poland to unite east Prussia with the remainder of Germany. But in the end of course Germany lost the war, and Russia demanded huge territorial concessions. It was decided at the Potsdam Conference that East Konigsberg should be given to Russia, resulting on one of the largest forced population moves following World War II. Before Potsdam East Prussia was almost completely inhabited by ethnic Germans, Russians had never lived in the territory. But at the end of the war about 2 million ethnic Germans were evacuated or forcibly expelled, and ethnic Russians moved in to the territory, which had been almost completely destroyed by World War II.

Kaliningrad was made into an SSR within the Soviet state, and at the time it was contiguous with the rest of the country because the Baltic states were part of the USSR. And with Poland and East Germany in the Warsaw Pact, Kaliningrad was located comfortably well within the Soviet sphere. But with the collapse of the USSR in 1991, things suddenly changed dramatically. Lithuania and Belarus broke away from the USSR and became independent countries. However it didn't make sense for Kaliningrad to become an independent country since it was still inhabited mainly by the ethnic Russians who had moved in during the 1950's. So the territory became a Russian island hundreds of miles away from Russia. Now that Lithuania and Poland have joined the EU and the Schengen Zone, the situation has become tricky.

What makes this situation especially complicated is that Kaliningrad is a sparsely populated, barren wasteland. Russia seemed to almost purposefully punish the territory after they acquired it. Rather than developing this incredibly strategic piece of land - now Russia's only year-round Baltic port - they ignored it. It is very difficult for foreigners to be granted a visa to enter the territory, and even Russians need permission to go there. It is an incredibly sad, desolate place.

For the past 15 years, while the West considered the new Russia to be a friend, the awkward situation of Kaliningrad didn't seem so important. But now with tensions rising between the West and Russia, and with Russia threatening to build up its military presence there, the territory's status could quickly become an issue. Can the EU handle a hostile enclave within its territory?

**Fun semantic trivia for your next cocktail party: Kaliningrad is an exclave of Russia and an enclave of the EU, but it is not an exclave or enclave of Lithuania or Poland because it is not completely surrounded by either.