At her first round of talks with her fellow Nato foreign ministers, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has just said that it’s “time to explore a fresh start” in relations with Russia. Virtually in the same breath, she has also rejected Russia’s claim to a special sphere of influence in the post-Soviet region, and said that the Western alliance shouldn’t close the door of membership to Georgia and Ukraine.

Is any of this different to what we heard during the final phase of the administration of President George W. Bush? In some respects, not much. The Bush administration also rejected the idea, put forward by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, that Moscow is entitled to a “privileged sphere of influence” in the non-Russian states of the former Soviet Union.

As for Georgia and Ukraine, the Bush administration once seemed keen to push the idea that they should join Nato. But it wasn’t able to convince France, Germany and others, who wondered how on earth Nato would apply the famous principle of collective defence - “one for all, and all for one” - embodied in Article Five of the alliance’s charter to two countries so dysfunctional and vulnerable to Russian influence.

Since Georgia’s de facto dismemberment at the hands of Russia last August, and since Ukraine’s descent into almost complete political paralysis and economic meltdown, Nato membership for both countries has, to put it mildly, not been one of the alliance’s top priorities. So what Clinton has just said is a mere formula, not any kind of new initiative. It certainly tells us nothing about where the Obama administration will put the emphasis in its foreign policy.

Still, the idea of a “fresh start” in Nato-Russian relations is new, and in fact is already beginning to take concrete shape. Formal high-level contacts between the two sides will resume soon. The prospects for progress on strategic arms control look especially promising.

On the other side of the coin, it is interesting to see that later today Clinton is due to attend a meeting of a body known as the Nato-Georgia Commission. This wasn’t on the original schedule of Clinton’s trip to Brussels, and got inserted at the last minute at the Georgians’ request. Various Nato allies, especially the US, obviously felt it would not be a good signal to leave the Georgians out in the cold - so here they come.

Perhaps I’m getting Marxist in my old age, but would it be wrong to suggest that economics is driving most things political in Belarus these days? That’s to say, does the world economic crisis explain the very modest gestures in the direction of political liberalisation that have recently been taken in what is emphatically Europe’s most tightly controlled state?

At the start of this year, with its economy tottering, Belarus devalued its currency by 20 per cent and negotiated a $2.5bn loan from the International Monetary Fund. Belarus has also secured a pledge of $2bn in credits from Russia, the giant neighbour from which it receives almost all its energy supplies at subsidised prices. Belarus has large debt repayments looming. The fact is, Belarus is in deep economic trouble and won’t get out of it without help from the IMF, the European Union and - let this not be forgotten in Western countries - Russia.

At the same time, President Alexander Lukashenko has relaxed political controls a little bit, allowing two independent newspapers to be sold through the state-run distribution network and setting up public consultative councils on human rights and media freedom. Opposition activists in Minsk told me last week that these measures didn’t add up to much and could be reversed at any moment. Moreover, two former political prisoners were rearrested earlier this month on what look like trumped-up charges of causing damage to property.

Nevertheless, EU policymakers have the impression that change - controlled change - may be on the horizon in Belarus. Some trace it to the appointment last July of one Vladimir Makey as the powerful head of Lukashenko’s presidential administration. Makey is an interesting guy. For one thing, he is, so I’m told, of mixed Lithuanian-Scottish origin (is “Makey” the Cyrillic spelling of “Mackay”?). For another, he trained as a foreign linguist and served in the Soviet armed forces in the communist era. About much of the rest of his career his official biography is not so specific.

Neither Lukashenko nor Makey is going to turn Belarus into a pro-Western country. It makes absolutely no strategic sense for a small country that, geographically and culturally, is so close to Russia. But Russia’s military smashing and de facto dismemberment of Georgia last August served as a wake-up call to Belarus’s leaders. If they want their country to remain independent, they need to draw a bit closer to the EU. And that means introducing a degree of political reform.

Economics explains a lot. But in the case of Belarus, so does the Russian bear factor.

Every year, back in communist times, British university students learning Russian used to get the chance to spend three months in the Soviet Union. If you were sent to Moscow or Leningrad (now St Petersburg), you’d hit the jackpot: wild times and minimal amounts of study were guaranteed. Kiev was held to be pretty good, too. But nobody, nobody at all, wanted to go to Minsk. It was as if a Russian learning English had hoped to go to London and found himself instead in Stoke-on-Trent.

Minsk, capital of what used to be called Soviet Byelorussia, and from 1991 the capital of independent Belarus, has changed quite a bit since then. But not in all respects. When I was there on a short trip last week, I found it hard to take my eyes off the huge Soviet-era sign in the middle of town that declares Minsk a “hero city” for its part in the victory over Nazi Germany. Belarus must be one of the few places on earth where the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution is still officially celebrated - not to mention “Tankmen’s Day”, another public holiday with Soviet military origins.

As in the 1980s, Belarus is a pretty difficult place to get into. I entered the country by car at a border point called Kammeny Log on the Lithuanian-Belarusan frontier. A grim sign there warns visitors (there aren’t many of them) that any attempt to bribe the border guards will earn you a fine and up to two years of “correctional labour” - or three years in prison.

For some bizarre reason, a Lithuanian who was travelling with me was ordered to buy health insurance at the border or else she wouldn’t be allowed in. It cost a mere €2, so this wasn’t some sneaky way of extracting large amounts of hard currency from foreigners to stave off national bankruptcy. Rather, it was perhaps just a way of delaying our entry, surmised a European ambassador in Minsk when I told him the story.

Getting out of Belarus is a bit of a palaver, as well. One border guard checks your car to see if there are the same number of people in it as there were when you entered Belarus. Another guard orders you to lift up your car’s bonnet to make sure … to make sure what? That you’re not hiding a revolver, a tin of caviar or a miniature dissident next to the dipstick?

More tomorrow on how the world financial crisis is threatening Belarus and confronting Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s authoritarian president since 1994, with some difficult choices between the European Union to the west and Russia to the east.

Apart from all their summits on the recession and financial crisis, European Union leaders are planning to get together in Prague on May 7 to launch something called the “Eastern Partnership”. This is an initiative designed to draw six post-Soviet states - Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine - closer to the EU, without holding out an explicit promise of membership at some future date.

Let’s hope that fate treats the Eastern Partnership more kindly than it has done the EU’s Union for the Mediterranean (UfM), a similar initiative for the bloc’s southern neighbours. This project, the brainchild of French President NIcolas Sarkozy, was launched in Paris to great fanfare in July. Then it nose-dived in January when the Gaza war broke out.

Libya, never an enthusiastic supporter of the UfM in the first place, said scathingly that the project was “a motionless corpse” and “the time-wasting, play-acting and ridiculous spectacles must end”. Of course, Libya doesn’t speak for everyone in north Africa and the Middle East. But there can be no doubt that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a curse on the UfM.

As for the Eastern Partnership, it seems another example of how the EU often has its heart in the right place, while lacking the power, conceptual vision and unity of purpose to do what it aspires to do. If the partnership had been in place a year ago, it wouldn’t have done much to affect the course of last August’s Russian-Georgian war, or January’s Russian-Ukrainian gas crisis, or Ukraine’s present economic meltdown.

All six states covered by the Eastern Partnership exist in the shadow of Russia, some more comfortably than others. The EU’s offer of free trade deals, visa facilitation arrangements and seminars to improve understanding of EU laws simply does not match the military, political and economic influence that Russia can wield in the region. After all, one of the favoured six - Georgia - was in effect partitioned by Russia a mere six months ago, in spite of all the EU’s protests, after Moscow’s recognition of the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

That doesn’t mean the EU should remain inactive. But the Eastern Partnership’s credibility isn’t helped by the open secret that Poland and Sweden proposed the initiative last year largely to counter-balance Sarkozy’s UfM.

However, perhaps the most glaring weakness of the UfM and the Eastern Partnership is that the EU, at the insistence of its budget-conscious governments, is committing only limited funds to both projects. This hasn’t gone unnoticed in the places where it matters. “They have one common problem - they don’t have dedicated finances and support. Whatever isn’t supported by a line in the budget usually doesn’t fly very high,” one interested observer said serenely last week.

Who was he? Vladimir Chizhov, Russia’s ambassador to the EU in Brussels.

Almost 20 years after the end of the Cold War, it is sobering to see how military and security policy decisions taken in Washington and Moscow can still shape the fate of Europe. Take the European Union’s Lisbon treaty, which sets out to reform the EU’s institutional arrangements.

The treaty, rejected by Irish voters last June but still viewed in official EU circles as an absolute necessity, is perhaps the last foreign policy issue on the mind of either Barack Obama or Vladimir Putin. But the US president and Russian prime minister are making overtures to each other on Europe-based missile and anti-missile shield systems that may damage the treaty’s prospects of ever coming into effect. Most EU leaders would see that as a great loss: they fear Europe won’t be able to project its influence effectively on the world stage unless the Lisbon reforms are in force.

A Russian military official said last week that the Kremlin would drop its threat, made in November, to deploy short-range missiles in Kaliningrad. For it sensed that US was in no hurry to set up an anti-missile system, first proposed by George W. Bush’s administration, in the Czech Republic and Poland.

Some people in Europe read this announcement as a “conciliatory” Russian gesture to Obama and his new team. Maybe. But others would say it looked like the old Soviet tactic of making a disproportionately bellicose threat, then withdrawing the threat and expecting it to be treated as a statesman-like act of diplomacy. It is also worth noting that Moscow is pressing on with plans for military, naval and air bases in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the territories it stripped last August from Georgia.

Be that as it may, the Russian declaration put the cat among the pigeons in the Czech Republic, where the Lisbon treaty has yet to be ratified. The minority Czech coalition government had hoped to strike a deal with the Social Democratic opposition, under which the Social Democrats would back the missile defence plan in return for government agreement to push the Lisbon treaty through parliament.

This compromise will clearly be in danger of collapse, if the US postpones deployment of the anti-missile system. And there are excellent reasons for the Obama administration to go for a postponement: the financial crisis, the anti-missile shield’s divisive impact on Nato, and the possibility of working more constructively with Moscow to contain Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons programme.

All of which explains why it is proving so difficult for the Czech Republic to ratify the Lisbon treaty. It is, in fact, alone among the EU’s 27 member-states in not having managed to hold a parliamentary or popular vote on the document. Given that the Czechs hold the EU’s rotating presidency, this is all getting rather embarrassing. It will take political courage and ingenuity to find a way forward.

Excuse the pun, but the Arctic is a hot topic in Brussels these days. So hot that I and many others struggled through wintry rain and darkness this morning to hear Elisabeth Walaas, Norway’s state secretary for foreign affairs, give a talk on the challenges facing the High North.

By now, the facts are well-known. The Arctic region is thought to contain huge energy resources, perhaps as much as 20 per cent of the world’s undiscovered, technically recoverable reserves. In an age of dwindling fossil fuel supplies, the temptation to exploit these resources is irresistible.

But the Arctic environment is exceptionally fragile. Global warming is already taking a severe toll. The ice and permafrost are melting. Ocean levels are rising. New shipping routes will open up. Fish stocks will move among different national jurisdictions, raising questions about how to stop uncontrolled harvesting. To cap it all, the US government declared last May that polar bears were an endangered species.

Meanwhile, territorial disputes hang over the Arctic. Canada and the US, for example, disagree about whether the Northwest Passage is an internal Canadian waterway or an international strait. This is no small matter. Once the passage is fully open, shipping companies will be able to knock thousands of nautical miles off their vessels’ journeys between Asia and Europe. Regulating the inevitable surge in maritime traffic will be a heavy responsibility.

The case for a strong international legal framework to govern the Arctic seems unanswerable. But here’s what Walaas said: “As we [in Norway] see it, there are no legal gaps in the Arctic that need to be filled, and no need for a new comprehensive international regime to govern the Arctic. What’s needed is effective implementation of what we’ve got.”

By this, she meant above all the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, but also several lesser codes and forums such as the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, the 1995 Fish Stocks Agreement, the Arctic Council (to which the European Union has applied for observer status) and the International Maritime Organisation.

All other Arctic states agree with Norway that the existing agreements are sufficient. For the US, former president George W. Bush made that plain in a national security directive adopted only one week before he left office. The main argument is that, unlike the Antarctic, where a treaty system dating to 1961 governs international conduct, the Arctic is an ocean under ice and falls under the scope of the Law of the Sea.

It’s interesting that the odd man out in this debate is the European Parliament. By a big majority, it passed a resolution last October calling for an international treaty for the protection of the Arctic. Legislators were fearful that Russia, in whose territory large amounts of the untapped energy reserves lie, wouldn’t extract the oil and gas without damaging the Arctic environment.

But if Walaas and others are right, then it would help if the US government were finally to ratify the Convention on the Law of the Sea. George W. Bush’s administration wanted to, but Senate conservatives thwarted him. Now John Kerry, the incoming Senate foreign relations committee chairman, says he will push for ratification because the Arctic is “a strategic priority for our nation”.

Will this be another area where Barack Obama’s arrival in the White House will make a difference?

Negotiating with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister and former president, is hard enough even when Europe’s relations with the Kremlin are going well - which they haven’t been for some while. For an insight into Putin’s brutal, hard as nails character, have a look at the official Russian government transcript of a conversation he had with some Moscow-based western reporters last week.

The discussion, which centres on the shut-off of Russian gas deliveries to the European Union via Ukraine, turns at one point to the possible deployment of EU monitors along the pipeline route through Ukrainian territory. “We hope that the issue will be resolved expeditiously. We don’t want a group of men and women to come to Kiev and just sit in a hotel and sip horilka [Ukrainian vodka],” Putin says.

Expressing impatience with what he sees as the European Commission’s slow, bureaucratic procedures, he warns: “You should get cracking. In such conditions, two hours would be enough. Instead, they are quibbling over details. They have no mandate? Let them get it.”

He directs even heavier fire at Ukraine’s leaders: “We are witnessing a political collapse inside Ukraine. I regret to say that it indicates a high level of corruption in Ukrainian government structures, which today are fighting not over the gas price but for the possibility to keep certain mediators in the game, in order to use the dividends for personal enrichment and to raise the necessary funds for future political campaigns.”

Answering a question on how anyone can know who is telling the truth about the gas crisis, Putin once again uses Ukrainian food imagery. “If you are not sure, send your own observers to the border between Russia and Ukraine, and to the border between Ukraine and western Europe. Go ahead. Sit there and watch from morning to night, eat salo [pig fat] and chase it down with horilka. They have excellent pig fat in Ukraine. My friends send it to me from Ukraine.”

Only at one point is there a hint of Putin’s KGB background, and of the personal world view that such a background helps to shape. He admonishes the reporters: “I don’t know what you’re going to write and what directions you will get from your bosses. Everything points to the fact that there are some directions, because the picture being presented is absolutely biased…”

Whew. Time for some horilka, I think.

Buried in last Wednesday’s €200bn European Commission economic recovery plan for Europe was a proposal that sent waves of relief through Lithuanian policymaking circles. This was the idea of allocating €5bn for trans-European energy connections.

A large chunk of this money is destined for Lithuania, the aim being to reduce the dangers that face the country after the planned closure of its Ignalina nuclear power plant on December 31, 2009. Ignalina supplies 70 per cent of Lithuania’s electricity, and when the plant is shut down Lithuania will be almost entirely dependent on Russia for its energy.

For sure, Russia has no obvious interest in starving Lithuania of electricity. The lines that send Russian electricity to Lithuania also send it through Lithuania to Kaliningrad, the Russian territory to the west. Still, given it’s only 17 years since Lithuania gained independence from the Soviet Union, and given the icy relations between Russia and its tiny neighbour, any form of dependence is understandably an unnerving prospect from a Lithuanian point of view.

As officials in Vilnius point out, Lithuania relies for gas on a single Russian pipeline that passes through Belarus. As for oil, the Russians closed down the ironically named Druzhba (”Friendship”) pipeline in 2006 for repair work that mysteriously never seems to get finished.

Once Ignalina is closed, “the probability of disaster is not very high, but it is probable that there will be serious problems”, says Aleksandras Abisala, the government’s special representative on energy security.

The Lithuanians have been hammering away at their European Union colleagues on this subject for so long that, according to those in the know, French President Nicolas Sarkozy finally decided to raise the matter with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at the recent EU-Russia summit in Nice. The response was very revealing of the present peppery mood in the Kremlin.

On the question of reopening the Druzhba pipeline, Medvedev committed himself to absolutely nothing. On the question of promising to maintain electricity deliveries to Lithuania from January 2010 onwards, Medvedev in effect said: “Nicolas, why are you talking to me about this? If the Lithuanians think they have a problem and want to talk about it, tell them to come and see me.”

In other words, Sarkozy’s efforts to speak up for Lithuania and give Medvedev a demonstration of what EU solidarity means in practice hit a big brick wall.

Lithuania had better receive some of that €5bn in EU funds quickly, or it will be a bitingly cold winter in 2010.