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This article focuses on relations between Russia and the European Union. Now that the German Question has been solved, the Russian Question beckons. Can Russia, after centuries of autocracy and imperialism, be turned into the sort of nice democratic country that gets along easily with its European neighbours? The answer seems to be: not for a while yet, to judge from a policy paper released last week by the European Commission, the European Union's executive body, which suggests that relations between the Union and Russia are close to a post-Soviet low. Some of these arguments go back years. But they are getting more heated with the approach of the EU's eastward enlargement in May. The EU will embrace ten countries in all, seven of which were subjects or satellites of the Soviet Union. The Commission's latest analysis of Russia marks a sharp change from its starry-eyed optimism of a year ago, when it published a document called "Wider Europe" saying that Russia, and other countries of eastern Europe and the southern Mediterranean, could be turned into a "ring of friends" around the enlarged Union, absorbing the Union's political and economic values and being rewarded with aid and improved market access.