moscow istanbul and tallinn

Moscow, Istanbul and Tallinn

Another week soon starting, and I'm rushing in order to get to the

Sunday afternoon flight from Stockholm to Moscow.

From one snowy place to one that promises to be even more snowy.

It's a seminar - very much in honour of Yegor Gaidar - on the

challenges of economic transformation that takes me to there during

the next few days. It will be a fairly big international gathering of

persons with some sort of experience of these situations.

You could perhaps call it a seminar on the experience of building

capitalism.

How it will be received in the present political setting of Russia

will be most interesting to see. But irrespectively of that it will be

a great gathering of great people with great possibilities of

interesting meetings and talks.

And I will of course take the opportunity of visiting the Kremlin to

get the mood of the powers of the day.

From this the Third Rome I'm heading straight to the Second Rome - to

Istanbul on the Bosphorous.

Another conference where I will speak about the relationship between

Turkey and Europe, as well as some more informal discussions on what

can be done in order to handle the crisis in the European accession

negotiations that now look almost inevitable towards the second half

of the year.

And I certainly don't expect any snow there. It should be spring by

now.

From there I go to Tallinn in Estonia to attend the funeral next

Sunday of late President Lennart Meri.

Otherwise this will be the week dominated by the meeting of the

European Council in Brussels on Thursday and Friday.

Economic reforms and energy policy will be at the centre of the

discussions there. It remains to be seen if there will be much

progress.