By IVAN KRASTEV
APRIL 27, 2015
SOFIA, Bulgaria — It was only a decade ago that Central Europe, in the American imagination, was Donald Rumsfeld’s “New Europe,” a collection of freedom-loving, heroic small nations — and America’s most loyal allies. Washington ushered them into NATO as a bulwark against Middle Eastern instability and Russian expansionism. Today, however, that perception has changed. Many fear that a number of these plucky, strategically vital states have become Moscow’s Trojan horses in the Western alliances.
The willingness of the Czech president, Milos Zeman, to attend the military parade in Moscow this spring marking the 70th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany — an event boycotted by Western heads of state — was widely read as a symbolic break with Central Europe’s Western orientation. (After intense pressure, Mr. Zeman withdrew from attending the parade but not from the trip itself.)
Meanwhile, the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, has signaled that his government would block the proposed establishment of a European energy union, a core part of Brussels’ strategy to reduce Russia’s influence in the region.
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