The protests in Ukraine started at the end of November exactly November 21 when President Yanukovych has arbitrarily set aside a long-awaited trade agreement that would " depth " ties with the EU and called on the contrary to what the people wanted , greater support to Russia. This sparked a series of popular demonstrations pro EU have gradually increased in number and intensity.

French troops and African Union peacekeepers are currently failing in stemming violence episodes in Central African Republic (CAR), and that’s why, during 19-20 December European Council, Paris called the European Union to intervene, by force of arms and/or by budgetary support. The core of the French proposal is the creation of a multinational military force deployable within the African continent at the first signs of a crisis. Relying on such a political and military tool, if rightly planned, the EU will be able to skip the huge political and diplomatic procedure that usually foreruns a military operation. But being such a delicate matter, the whole debate has been postponed to the first 2014 European Council.  

Diplomatic tension between Russia and the Euro-Atlantic axis is increasing, and that is because of a certain number of short-range Iskander missiles (called SS-26 Stone in NATO code) have been deployed by Moscow in Kaliningrad (Russian enclave enclosed by Poland, Lithuania and the Baltic Sea) and along Estonian and Latvian borders. 

The energetic war between Russia and EU enriches of a new, precious tessera: few days ago, in fact, the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, and the managing director of Gazprom, Aleksej Miller, have established, in a meeting which took place in the magyar capital, that the building of the South Stream pipeline, sponsored by Gazprom itself and doomed to transport the russian natural gas from the shores of the Black Sea to the Western Europe (bypassing Ukraine), will go on withouth delays, with the opening of the construction sites in April 2015, as expected.

Putin and Pope Francis united in the defense of Christians in the world.

The two-day Italian Vladimir Putin is positioned as a real opportunity to enable new relations between Italy, Russia and the Holy See.

Civil war clouds are gathering above Central African Republic (CAR), a “lawless” country, where the number of clashes between Christians and Muslims is increasing, where armed groups have been accused of atrocities against civil population (including killings, burning villages and child soldiers conscription). That’s the alarm bell that was stressed by the United Nation in late November. 

Everyone knows what the “global surveillance disclosures saga” is about, everyone knows when and how it started; but how many people could say how is it going to end? The answer is nobody, actually. Nevertheless, formulating a kind of prevision is not out of our hands.

Snowden cyclone has been hitting European and Euro-Atlantic political relationships again in the last few weeks, and the Great Britain found herself in the middle of it. The political atmosphere started becoming really tense when Snowden affirmed that French, German, Italian government and about other thirty world political leaders have been spied by the NSA; but it got even worse since, according to the latest revelations as the Daily and Sunday Express reported, British 007s have been cooperating with US secret services in gathering data form the Italian government and phone and spying on Italian citizens phone and internet traffic on a huge scale. Simultaneously the BBC impartially claimed that such wiretapping were just a little piece of a greater security operation called Tempora leaded by the British GCHQ agency (Government Communications Headquarters) linked to the NSA PRISM activities.

Once again, street protests go back to warm the hearts of the Bulgarian people, the occasion, this time, was that the event organized on November 13 in memory of the fall of the communist regime in the country, when, now twenty-four years ago, students and ordinary citizens marched through the streets of Sofia against the too generous pro-Soviet policy of  Teodor Zhivkov, leader of Bulgaria from July 1971 to November 1989.