Press

Hugo Brady, senior research fellow at the Centre European Reform, said the commission needed to change its rules to allow Lady Ashton to send a deputy to meetings. "If it doesn't work it will reflect badly on the commission as well", he said.

"The problems are without precedent," says Centre for European Reform's Charles Grant, who predicts five years of "ghastly mess" for Europe, fraught with further political and financial tensions over debt, before the continent's economic renaissance emerges.

"This is a political crisis, not an economic one, because European governments could put this crisis to bed", says Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform. "If you take the aggregate picture, the eurozone doesn't have a problem," he says.

Putin is shrewd at exploiting the power of the media and combines political grandstanding with more image conscious messages, says Katinka Barysch, deputy director of the Centre for European Reform in London. "You can either give a speech or strip your shirt off and stand in a river, he does both," she said. "He strikes me very much as the second leader of the media age, because Gorbachev was very media savvy as well. He also realised that images speak more than a thousand words," says Barysch.

"There is no doubt that Italy is now vulnerable to a deterioration of investor sentiment", said Simon Tilford, the chief economist at the CER in London. "If they were to have a period of instability and less prudent management of the country's public finances, that could well prompt more investors to look more askance." ..."Depending on what happens with Spain, Italy can make contagion more likely and more rapid by mismanaging its fiscal position." Indeed, whatever the political outcome here on Tuesday, Mr Tilford added, "Italy isn’t out of the woods."

"The problem of the European responses since the start of the year has been that they have always been slightly behind the curve," said Philip Whyte, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform.

"Most of the information on this is not in the public domain. But the bottom line is that there is enough political will in NATO now to do defence plans for the Baltic states. The opposition has melted away over the past 18 months," said Tomas Valasek, defence analyst at the Centre for European Reform. … "The whole point is not to paint Russia as a threat. It is about reassuring those countries that are seriously worried. The debate is primarily about Poland and the Baltic. Geography has a lot to do with it," said Valasek.

One solution might be to restructure those countries' debts now and allow them to get their economies in order under humane circumstances, said Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform. Such a simultaneous shock-and-awe move, Tilford said, might stop contagion and take pressure of Italy and Spain. "By going halfway, you're making everything worse," he said.