Politics: november 2007 Archives

Following up on a post where I talked about last dictatorship in Europe and has many concerns on Russia.

Now thanks to Jaanus, who has found this Channel 4 documentary about Russia and life there.

After watching this I see that you can only dream in Russia of having a essential democratic freedoms, like freedom of speech, on the other hand you see some head washed junior Putin supporters..

You can compare the todays Russia with 1930's Germany  where there was a high dislike for foreigners living there and how they are being treated their own people.

There were also images how a local paramilitary person has still Hitlers Mein Kampf on his bookshelf and how he shouts: "Heil Hitler!".

Now after seeing it I feel that most Russians who are being mistreated are not living abroad, like in Baltic states how Russian propaganda wants to show it happening, but they are "enjoying" their life in the mother Russia itself.

It's pretty hard to imagine after seeing this documentary how a president of the European Human Rights Commission PACE, Rene van der Linden, can state out that in Estonia Russians are being mistreated by the laws and people.

You can read a further about the Rene van der Linden statements and reply to him from Estonian MEP Marko Mihkelson's blog.

Of course there are also brighter days in daily life for Russians, but in general this documentary should give you pretty good overview of Russians everyday life, watch it here:

As mentioned in the previous post that we are going to talk about the Energy Security and policy in Europe.

We heard some presentations and had discussions on the topic of Energy Security of the State - new challenges for Europe and the world and I came into following conclusions.

Main problems for Europe on energy safety are:

• No common energy policy towards partners
• Dependency on energy import
• Lack of energy mix
• Growing prices
• Raising demand for energy, estimated 60% growth to 2030
• Lack of carbon free energy
• Nuclear power
• Percentage of imported energy is estimated to grow to 86%

I find that most important problems in energy security for Europe are:

• No common policy towards our partners, mainly Russia
• Increase investments to technologies
• Alternative routes for energy
• Decrease of energy consumption
• 
  

There are no single solutions for those questions, but there are some things on what we can focus to improve the situation.