Commentary
Politics
EU Should Enlarge, Even Out of Despair – COMMENTARY
3 October 2024
The recent Ukrainian lessons learned show that heavy dependence on Russian markets and widespread penetration of the domestic market by Russian companies could be eventually used as another pressure tool.
The global role of China is nowadays, during the COVID-19 pandemic, clearly a dominating topic in the Western geopolitical debates and Russia seems to be overshadowed with that, the influence and, most of all, geopolitical interests and objectives of the latter have not disappeared.
A lot has been written about Russian hybrid threats and operations mainly in the area of disinformation campaigns or interference into electoral processes in third countries, through which Russia tries to destabilise the situation also inside the EU or individual European countries.
Incomparably less attention has been devoted to Russian economic interference abroad using classic business instruments like foreign direct investments, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in European economies conducted by Russian individual ‘private’ companies and investors.