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Comment by thriftwy | Hacker News Reader

Russia did not see any important integration with Europe countries even before 2014. Yes there were hydrocarbon pipelines but that's that. Amenities such as visa waiver travel, student exchange programmes, cultural exchange and economic integration were practically nonexistent.

It does sound strange if you claim to want to avoid a new war in Europe but systemically exclude the largest country in Europe from that equation. Meanwhile trying to integrate their direct neighbours into your sphere of influence.

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Did Russia ever attempt to apply to join the EU?

The real countries in reduce war equation were Germany and France, not Russia.

Actually, during the Medvedev presidency, there were serious efforts to negotiate visa-free travel and reduced tariffs (which is the essence of what everybody wants, not full integration). If these things were granted, the revolution / civil war in Ukraine, primarily motivated by one part of the country mostly trading with Russia and the other with the EU, probably wouldn't have happened.

That doesn't account for how eastern Ukraine has a much larger percent of ethnic Russians than western, nor Russia's invasions andntakeovers of other former Soviet territories.

Putin made some comments in the early 2000's to the effect that Russia sees itself as part of the European culture and might like to be part of the EU, but it wants its own viewpoint on things to be respected. I suspect the latter is a crucial caveat. Presumably he'd never be okay with implementing a liberal democracy to EU standards or signing up to EU defence policy.

On the other side, I suspect that none of the existing EU members would be happy with having a new one that's so much larger in population than any of the others that it'd gain effectively a veto power over everything, to say nothing of the domestic political issues with potential east-to-west migration.

EU voting power for issues that matter is state based in the European Commission, not population based.

I think that's oversimplified. The European Commission is the executive, not a legislative body. The EU has effectively a bicameral legislature formed by the Parliament and the Council. The Parliament has direct elections with seats apportioned to member states roughly corresponding to population. The Council represents member states directly, but they only sometimes have equal weight, because many things use qualified-majority voting (QMV) where a majority of states and represented population is required. Most things either need to pass through both of these legislatures, or if they're exclusive to the Council, are covered by QMV. The number of things covered by QMV has only grown with time and lots of these would be considered important. There are of course still some matters that require unanimity among states though.

Putin's view on Russia in the EU was essentially that he never wanted Russia to be on the same level as the member states. He wanted Russia to be at the same level as the EU as a whole if not greater. It stems from a combination of nostalgia for the Soviet Union and a sense of Elitism endemic in parts of the culture.

This is absurd notion since the question of accepting Russia into the EU was never raised even remotely, therefore we have no idea what specific conditions will be negotiated by the parties in this nonexistent scenario. I don't really think Russia could be included in the EU in any form.

It could, however, by 2013 have massive students exchange, Schengen visa waiver programme for short visits, cultural exchange, etc. None of that happened. EU just wanted oil & gas and unilaterally accept some of the brighter students into their universities, ideally having them pay for that privilege.

EU also wanted to "euroassociate" our neighbour countries, where they will get no guarantees or support of being EU member, but would open their markets to the EU and half-shut their markets, and borders, towards Russia. That was a directly hostile move towards Russia, who was completely shut off these arrangements.

EU and USA were also openly nagging Ukraine to boot Russian naval base from Crimea. A directly hostile move which backfired quickly and led to the whole war thing in the end.

> sphere of influence

That phrase is a relic of a long ago era. The EU would be more effective if it had more influence on its member states, but it reached a level where it does appear to dramatically reduce the chance of war, but from there, further integration has asymptoted.

I can’t say that colonialism is completely obsolete but influence has become so diffuse and information spread so widespread that even an analysis from that stance is no longer useful.

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