Audio: A New Direction in Russian Relations

All Things Considered on National Public Radio has a new audio segment interviewing several experts and EU diplomats who hope to see a “new direction” in Europe-Russia relations following the first series of meetings since the war in Georgia.  Fiona Hill of Brookings draws a parallel between diplomacy and outdated technology – she tells NPR:  “Informal networks have a much more important role to play than formal networks.  We see this in the tandem between Medvedev and Putin — often the official positions of officials don’t really correspond to their weight in the system. So we have to, in some respects, find a software plug-in, basically, between our two operating systems to find a way to talk to each other more clearly.