Insights

This week on the Global Counsel Podcast, Practice Director Alexander Smotrov, Associate Alexander van der Wusten, and Associate Magnus Obermann discuss the impact of the Russia-Ukraine war on the business sector after a year of fighting. What does Ukraine's resilience mean for rebuilding efforts, why are businesses struggling to fully untangle…

Twelve years after the Arab Spring, which emanated from Tunisia, the revolution has run out of money and steam. Eleven elections in eleven years and expensive subsidies for increasingly unaffordable wheat from Russia and Ukraine, along with other inefficiencies, have bankrupted the country politically and economically. While President Kais Saied is curtailing the powers…

2022 has popularised a new German word in international politics: Zeitenwende, an “epochal tectonic shift”, emanating from Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Europe’s increased awareness of economic exposure to authoritarian regimes has coincided with the emergence of new, China-critical voices in European capitals, such as the Greens in Germany, which have…

Following Russia’s mobilisation and annexation of four Ukrainian regions, the EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell announced that EU members had agreed on additional sanctions against Russia, which “will be brought forward as soon as possible.” Political agreement on the eighth EU sanctions package is expected not later than at the EU’s Foreign Affairs Council on…

Following an agreement among EU foreign ministers in late August, on September 9th the European Council adopted a recommendation by the European Commission to suspend the 2007 EU-Russia visa facilitation agreement. As of September 12th, Russian applicants for short-term visas face a lengthier, harder and much costlier process. Similar restrictions for long-term visas…