(EDM) After the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) contentious jubilee summit in London last week (December 3–4) (see EDM, December 2), the fulcrum of European politics has shifted to two different summits, in which President Vladimir Putin was supposed to perform foremost roles. The first one took place in Sochi, on December 7, with Putin and Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka meeting to discuss the prospects of closer bilateral integration of their two countries. The second high-level event occurred in Paris today (December 9), with the purpose of negotiating a settlement for the slow-burning conflict in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas, within the so-called “Normandy format,” which involves the leaders of Russia, France, Germany and Ukraine. Over the past few days however, political passions in Moscow were ignited not by the serial summit proceedings, but by local court cases, in which seven Russian opposition activists were tried for alleged extremism (Kommersant, December 7). Consequently, Yegor Zhukov, a student from the prestigious Moscow Higher School of Economics, who showed remarkable composure and dignity under harsh pressure and became a new face of the protest movement. […]
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