The European Union’s leaders travel next month to Khanty-Mansiysk for a summit with Dmitry Medvedev, the new Russian president. Will they find time, I wonder, in this booming western Siberian oil town to stop off at the crossroads of Sverdlova and Pionerskaya streets? They should do. There, in front of School No. 5, they will find a recently erected memorial to the victims of Stalin’s repressions - at least, so the town’s government website says.

The existence of this memorial reminds us to think twice before rushing to judge today’s Russia. The country clearly moved to a more authoritarian, centralised form of rule under Vladimir Putin, and civil liberties were curtailed. But many Russians remain as determined as ever to expose the truth about their country’s bloodstained communist past. These days, Stalin cannot be airbrushed from Russia’s history as easily as he used to airbrush his opponents.

Putin’s reordering of Russia and his revival of its great power foreign policy ambitions contributed to a downturn in EU-Russian relations, but none of that makes Russia a monotonal society. As EU enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn said in a thoughtful speech last week: “The rise of the middle class and entrepreneurs in Russia should eventually mean growing demands for property rights and, by extension, legal certainty. This internal dynamic may lead Russia to reform its legal system and make its political system more accountable - but this is certainly not an automatic process by any means.”

Russia’s leaders at present can hardly be said to share the EU’s core values of freedom, democracy and the rule of law. But neither do other countries important to Europe, including, for example, most of its neighbours on the southern shores of the Mediterranean. As with these neighbours, so with Russia - there’s little choice but to try to improve relations. 

It would be wrong to kick Russia out of the G8, as John McCain suggested in March - even if that were possible. Rather, the EU and the US should be hard-headed but practical in its dealings with Russia and, above all, recognise that relations with Moscow tend to be at their most difficult when western countries themselves are disunited.

“Experience shows that Russia respects the EU when we are able to adopt united positions, and act accordingly. Conversely, Russia is adept at exploiting disunity among member-states,” David Milliband and Bernard Kouchner, the UK foreign secretary and French foreign minister, wrote in a joint letter in March to the EU’s Slovenian presidency.

All too true. But the Khanty-Mansiysk summit will show whether these wise words were just that - words.

As European Union summits go, the March 13-14 event in Brussels is turning out to be short, sedate and - dare one say it - soporific. It’s Friday morning now - day two - and the 27 national leaders won’t even be sticking around for a group lunch. People are wandering around the venue, the Justus Lipsius building in Brussels, with summit badges, mobile phones and that look on their faces which says: “If 99 per cent of life is just being there, at an EU summit it’s 100 per cent.”

Even French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s performance at a midnight press conference was as thin as a crêpe dentelle. He claimed his fellow EU leaders had welcomed his call for a Mediterranean Union “with great enthusiasm” at a dinner on Thursday evening. But I have run into delegates from at least four countries who say the idea was approved in an “oh, well, let him have his toy if he wants it” sort of way.

The Mediterranean Union (MU, pronounced “Moo”)  is one of those EU schemes that you can tell is going nowhere right from the start because of a debate over what to call it. It appears that from now on it is to be known not as the MU but as the Union for the Mediterranean (UM, pronounced “Um”). For the hundreds of millions of people who live on the sea’s shores from Valencia to Tel Aviv, whether it’s Moo or Um cannot make the blindest bit of difference.

The idea behind Moo/Um is to strengthen co-operation between the EU’s 27 member-states and non-EU countries that have a Mediterranean coast, from Morocco and Algeria to Lebanon and Syria. It will reinforce and upgrade the EU’s Barcelona process, which started in 1995 and is generally regarded as, to put it kindly, an underperforming asset.

Why is that? The ever honest José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, provided an answer this morning to a few reporters over breakfast: “The Barcelona process has at times suffered from negative developments in the Middle East peace process.”

You can say that again, José. At a meeting in November 2005 marking the 10th anniversary of the Barcelona process, the only non-EU leaders who bothered to show up were Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Why Moo/Um should fare any better is hard to see. As things stand, Sarkozy is planning a one-day summit in Paris on July 13 that is supposed to bring together the EU 27 and the North African and Middle Eastern states of the Mediterranean. But it only takes one look at the recent violence in Israel and Gaza over recent weeks to suspect that a repeat of the November 2005 fiasco, with practically no Arab officials showing up, is all too possible.

There is a lesson in all this, if the EU chooses to take it. As Ayman el-Amir wrote two years, what matters are the root causes of conflict between cultures. Moos and Ums are all very well, but the real point is that it’s high time for the EU and its southern Mediterranean neighbours to put aside pious nonsenses about a “dialogue of civilisations” and tackle the hard political issues that divide them.

They say English is the European Union’s lingua franca these days, and for better or worse it probably is. But a knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese turns out to be very handy as well.

At the EU’s Lisbon summit on approving the long-awaited institutional reform treaty, Luís Amado, Portugal’s foreign minister, emerged late in the evening to update the press on the progress that EU leaders were making.

Transfixed no doubt by his immaculately trimmed beard and equally immaculate English (one could imagine him in a 19th century group portrait with Lev Tolstoy and Karl Marx), none of the assembled hacks
and hackettes paid much attention when a reporter asked Amado a question in Portuguese - all the others he answered were put in English.

Was it true, the reporter asked Amado, that one of the main obstacles blocking approval of the treaty would disappear because Italy would be offered an extra seat in the European parliament and the parliament’s president would give up his voting rights? She added that she had picked this up at a Spanish press briefing.

Smooth as ever, Amado answered that this was one of the things that the leaders were looking at. But once again few of those present bothered to listen to him because he was speaking Portuguese.

And yet it turned out that the Portuguese-speaking reporter was absolutely right - as Amado was probably well aware.

So there are two lessons here for all of us. One is to brush up on the language of the country that holds the six-month rotating EU presidency (from January, eh-hem, it’s Slovenia). The other is to attend Spanish press briefings. Olé!