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Club de Nice – 14th Annual Forum.
26 Nov 20151. Le prix de l’energie: la baisse du prix du petrole et ses consequences.
2. La crise de relations Russie-Europe et ses consequences dans le domaine energetique. Quelles Alternatives?
3. Energie Nouvelles – Nouvelles Technologies.
Je suis PARIS!
14 Nov 2015
First Baltic gas pipeline without Russia.
15 Oct 2015Poland has signed a deal to build the first gas pipeline connecting the Baltic states to the EU energy market. The pipeline will integrate EU and Baltic energy markets and reduce dependence on Russian gas.
The 558 million euro ($636 million) gas pipeline will end the energy isolation of the Baltic countries by connecting the gas markets of Poland and Lithuania, the European Commission said
“Today we have done much more than bringing the energy isolation of the Baltic States to an end. We have brought the region further together,” European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said. “We are launching a project that will allow us to overcome historic limitations, including the direction of gas supplies from East to West,” PM Kopacz told a press conference.
The 534-kilometer (332-mile) Gas Interconnector Poland-Lithuania (GIPL) will be backed by a 305 million euro investment from the European Commission, which has set out the goal of creating an integrated European gas market and ensuring members have multiple supplies of energy. Once the GIPL is built, it will connect the Lithuanian, Estonian and Latvian gas network with the EU. The pipeline is scheduled to be completed by December 2019.
Earlier this week, PM Ewa Kopacz opened a liquefied natural gas terminal at the Baltic port of Świnoujście, northern Poland, which is yet another move expected to improve the energy independence of the country. The first shipment of LNG is expected to arrive from Qatar in December
The crash of flight MH17 on 17 July 2014 was caused by the detonation of a 9N314M-type warhead launched from the eastern part of Ukraine using a Buk missile system. So says the investigation report published by the Dutch Safety Board today. Moreover, it is clear that Ukraine already had sufficient reason to close the airspace over the eastern part of Ukraine as a precaution before 17 July 2014. None of the parties involved recognised the risk posed to overflying civil aircraft by the armed conflict in the eastern part of Ukraine.
Brochure
Aleksander Lukashenko has won a fifth term as president of Belarus with a victory that could ease relations with the West and raise questions about his ties to Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Lukashenko won 83.5% of the vote, the Central election commission said, 3.5% more than in the 2010 elections. Turnout was 86.75%, the commission added.
No veteran opposition leaders stood as they were not allowed to register. They said that the vote would not be free or fair. Dozens of opposition supporters held a protest march in the capital Minsk after the polls closed.
Relations with Moscow have shown signs of strain. In September, Vladimir Putin approved a plan to build an airbase in Belarus, but Lukashenko said his country had no need for such a base.
The EU will lift its sanctions on Belarus, including those on Lukashenko, for four months after the vote, diplomatic sources reported last week.
A long waited summit for peace in eastern Ukraine ended with a call for the delay of contentious rebel plans to hold local elections this month and for both sides to begin a promised withdrawal of smaller-caliber weapons.
Russian President Vladimir Putin met Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Paris. The summit was the first since the leaders worked out a peace deal in Minsk in February. 
“We don’t want elections to get held in eastern Ukrainian territories under conditions that would not respect Minsk,” Hollande said. The Minsk deal includes a year-end deadline for Kyiv to recover full control over its border with Russia.
The Ukrainian pullback will take 41 days. “The war will be over when the last piece of the Ukrainian land has been liberated,” Poroshenko said.
Merkel, who described a “positive mood” at the Paris meeting, said after the talks that Putin had “committed to working towards…establishing the conditions that would allow elections to take place according to Minsk, based on Ukrainian law, in a coordinated fashion between the separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk and the Ukrainian government.”
But the separatists’ representatives in Donetsk and Luhansk have previously announced they would conduct elections on their own terms on October 18 and November 1, respectively, without the involvement of the Ukrainian government.
The regular regional elections in the rest of the country are scheduled for October 25.
An historic meeting between Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church is “getting closer every day,” Metropolitan Hilarion, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church’s foreign relations department, said in an interview.
He said the meeting between the head of the 1.2 billion member Roman Catholic Church and the head of Russian Orthodox Church – which counts some 165 million of the world’s 250 million Orthodox Christians – would take place in a “neutral” country, not in Moscow or the Vatican. Austria or Hungary were possibilities, he said.
Francis told reporters last year that he had sent word to Kirill that he was willing to meet the Russian patriarch “wherever you want, you call me and I’ll come”.
Poland, a wider referendum.
27 Jun 2015The popular vote was proposed by outgoing head of state Bronisław Komorowski, following the first round of the presidential election on 10 May.
The referendum will ask three questions, on political funding, changes in the voting system and the principles governing tax law.
During a press conference, PM Kopacz said that PiS did not originally want the referendum. Now PiS deputy leader Beata Szydło has said that the party wants to widen the scope of the referendum slated for 6 September.
PiS proposes to add questions about lower the retirement age, the minimum schooling age (currently six years in Poland) and the limiting the selling of state-owned forests.
Beata Szydło was nominated by party leader Jarosław Kaczyński as the candidate for the post of Prime Minister in the autumn general election.
Material from Radio Polska.
The UN Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution endorsing measures for the implementation of the new truce on Ukraine crisis.
The Council reaffirmed “its full respect for the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine,” and expressed “its grave concern at the tragic events and violence in eastern regions of Ukraine.”
The 15-nation body endorsed the “Package of measures for the implementation of the Minsk Agreements”, adopted on Feb. 12 in Minsk and called for full implementation of the measures, including “a comprehensive ceasefire“.
It also stressed that the resolution of the situation in eastern Ukraine “can only be achieved through a peaceful settlement to the current crisis.” The resolution was adopted shortly after the Council issued a statement to the press on Ukraine, urging all parties to immediately cease hostilities.
Minsk-2 maps, Минск-2 карты.
16 Feb 2015
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