Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who was officially nominated as candidate for president, told supporters that Kiev could build neighborly relations with Moscow, but its future lay with Europe. READ MORE

Disinformation, or the planting of false information to deceive or smear an enemy, is now being regularly used by both government and non-governmental players in  Russia and Ukraine in the fierce battles for control of power and assets in these countries. During the January 2009 "gas war" between Ukraine and Russia, the Russian leadership accused Ukraine of preventing Russian gas from reaching customers in the E.U. READ MORE

Inside the European pipeline fantasy that became a real-life gas war with Russia.

When Joschka Fischer's lucrative new job as the "political communications advisor" to a consortium of European energy companies was leaked to a German business publication this summer, there was one comment that stood out. "Welcome to the club," said Gerhard Schröder, an even more highly paid advocate for the other side in Europe's increasingly politicized energy war.

Schröder's remark was short, snide -- and very much to the point. For eight years, the two men had led Germany together, with Schröder ruling as its center-left chancellor and Fischer as his foreign minister. Their long-running partnership had survived a particularly complicated era in post-Cold War Europe, and publicly Fischer had always been supportive, even telling Der Spiegel that Schröder "will go down in the history books as a great chancellor." READ MORE

The visit of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to Poland is the most significant event in the foreign policy of Poland in 2009. The Government of Donald Tusk has a serious task to normalize Polish-Russian relations, which has lately occurred to be almost frozen. READ MORE