News that Conoco will sell off a significant portion of its Russian holdings is couched in terms of various corporate strategies that make all this perfectly normal. Conoco is said to need cash and will anyway have a 10% share remaining in Lukoil that will provide them some degree of influence in corporate decisions.

Even though Russia's economy has returned to growth-on the back of higher oil prices-the financial crisis of 2008-09 will continue to reverberate across Russian politics and foreign policy. Domestically, the crisis has called into question the "social bargain" of the Putin years. It has also complicated President Dmitry Medvedev's push for economic liberalization and modernization.

The German environment minister Norbert Röttgen (CDU) revived the German debate about the future of nuclear power in February when he argued for a limited lifetime extension of Germany’s nuclear plants.

8 % of worldwide gas reserves are located on the African continent. Its relative economic weakness and the almost total absence of gas networks leads to a very reduced interior consumption (almost nonexistent outside Algeria and Egypt) which permits an important export capacity of the continent’s gas. Linking Sub-Saharan-Africa and the European Union (EU) with a gas pipeline thus is a reasonable project in economic terms.

Sub-Saharan African hopes of democratization raised by the end of the cold war and the decline in the number of single party states are giving way to disillusionment. Today, even countries such as Senegal and South Africa, reputed for their democratic nature, are threatening to veer towards authoritarianism.

The European gas market has an unusually large number of moving parts just now. Demand forecasts are buffeted by announcements of great expectations in de-carbonizing the energy mix, differing expectations on the longer term economic growth path and a range of assessments on how soon Europe will recover from the economic recession.

The Lisbon Treaty was meant to mark the dawning of a new era for the EU. But as this issue of Politique étrangère demonstrates, the present outcome, which is only in part the result of the Treaty, is far from satisfactory.

The present paper aims to describe the vitality and complexity of bilateral trade along the Sino-Myanmar border.