As it did not aspire to EU membership itself, Russia’s first
two presidents, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, apparently considered it possible to maintain normal
ties with former Soviet bloc allies despite the likely fulfilment of their EU aspirations. Russia may have
underestimated the dramatic change in political orientation that EU accession would imply for its
western neighbours, and at the same time Russia’s leaders seemed fixated on the hazards that NATO’s
eastern expansion posed to Russia’s dominance in its former sphere of influence.
They may also have
mistakenly assumed that the EU membership of these former allies would somehow inject pro-Russian
voices. However, once eight of the former post-communist countries entered the EU (including the
three Baltic states that had actually formed part of the Soviet Union), the implications became more
clear, introducing some new sources of tension into Russia’s relations with the EU. Several issues required
immediate attention. One involved the extension of the EU-Russia Partnership and Cooperation Agreement
(PCA), established in 1997, to include the new member states. Another concerned the sticky issue of
transit through Lithuania (now an EU member state) from mainland Russia to the exclave Kaliningrad
Oblast. Tightened border protocols, related to preparation for accession of the new member states to
the Schengen group (which took place in December 2007 for the 2004 entrants to the EU) made visa
requirements mandatory between Russia and the EU member states.