In the same essay Huntington wrote:
...The most significant dividing line in Europe, as William Wallace has suggested, may well be the eastern boundary of Western Christianity in the year 1500. This line runs along what are now the boundaries between Finland and Russia and between the Baltic states and Russia, cuts through Belarus and Ukraine separating the more Catholic western Ukraine from Orthodox eastern Ukraine, swings westward separating Transylvania from the rest of Romania, and then goes through Yugoslavia almost exactly along the line now separating Croatia and Slovenia from the rest of Yugoslavia. ....Thanks to the European Tribune for pointing it out, here's more.
And from Bloomberg:
The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan may meet this week in a bid to defuse escalating tensions between the two countries after at least 18 soldiers were killed in the worst clashes in two decades.
Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan will hold talks with his Azeri counterpart, Ilham Aliyev, in Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi on Aug. 8-9, Armenian Prime Minister Hovik Abrahamyan said on the government’s website. Azerbaijan has yet to agree to the negotiations, ANS TV reported, citing Novruz Mammadov, deputy head of Aliyev’s office. President Vladimir Putin plans separate meetings with the two leaders at the end of the week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Itar-Tass.
The skirmishes between the South Caucasus countries, which border Turkey and Iran, flared amid the worst geopolitical standoff since the Cold War between Russia and the U.S. over the conflict in Ukraine. The fighting in the past week in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh has been the deadliest since the two former Soviet states signed a cease-fire in 1994.
“We hope that serious arrangements will be reached during the meeting,” Abrahamyan said. “We are not afraid of war, I just think it is not clever to solve problems with wars in the 21st century.”
A renewed war between Azerbaijan, an ally of the U.S. and Turkey, and Russian-backed Armenia has the potential to put NATO directly at odds with the government in Moscow, according to Timothy Ash, a London-based economist for emerging markets at Standard Bank Group Plc.
‘Re-Arming Rapidly’
“Militarily, Armenia is still thought to have superiority, given Russian backing, but with its rising oil wealth, Azerbaijan has been re-arming rapidly,” Ash said yesterday by e-mail.
With Azerbaijan’s forces restrained by the fear of Russian retaliation, the message is that “Russia is important in the region, and its views need to be taken account of everywhere in the post-Soviet space,” Ash said....MORE
