Jet lag tops EU agenda at yearly Russia summit

[FT_news]

Russian and European Union officials had a choice of 11 time zones when they chose a venue for the annual Russia-EU summit. They picked Khabarovsk, near the Chinese border and nine time zones from Brussels.

They chose the far eastern city of Khabarovsk, 25km from the Chinese border and nine time zones from Brussels.

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[forum_admin]

It is hardly Russia’s European face; off the beaten track, even by Russian standards. If you fly there from Moscow, the first day will be lost to jet lag. President Dmitry Medvedev has recently taken to video-conferencing with the far eastern region’s bureaucrats as a saner alternative to flying there.

“You lose two whole days when you go out to the far east,” he told two governors from the region during a televised internet chat on the presidential laptop. Bleary-eyed EU summit delegates had no such luxury on Thursday as they wandered the streets of the pleasant Siberian town. “I’ve lost the sense of day and night,” said one at about 8pm – or 11am Brussels time. One of the favourite activities of the jet-lagged attendees on Thursday was swapping stories about how Khabarovsk came to be chosen as the venue. Was it a fiendish plot to disorientate the easily divided Europeans ahead of tricky negotiations on Russian gas? It seems not. The Kremlin, apparently, had not wanted to choose the location for fear of offending powerful regional governors who were gunning for the honour of hosting it, “so they said ‘let the Europeans choose’”, according to an east European diplomat. José Manuel Barroso, European Commission president, and Václav Klaus, Czech president – the Czechs hold the revolving EU presidency – had a look at the list of prospective sites before Mr Klaus picked Khabarovsk, because “he hadn’t been there before and wanted to see it”, according to a diplomat, who asked not to be named. The city, like virtually every Siberian frontier town, boasts pleasant tree-lined central streets named after Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx, numerous parks, statues of Alexander Pushkin and a lapdance establishment that delegates have been advised to steer clear of.

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