I'm John Batchew with my colleague Judy Dempsey of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

And through Judy's offices, I've been able to imagine myself in European nations.

I didn't know much counted for anything when I was growing up because we had a map.

It was all red and it was called the Soviet Union.

That's all I had to know. And when I took Russian in high school, all I had to know was I was going to fight the Cold War.

Well, inside that red map were a lot of nations that have ambitions. Some of them are EU, some of them are NATO, some of them are neither.

And I see a headline in the Financial Times

that seems very promising about the future, not just about the difficult present. EU budgets

shake up to shift billions to eastern states, writes the FD. Leaked Brussels proposals suggest

new method for distributing 750 billion euros of farm and development funds.

Judy, this looks promising.

This looks like the EU is now turning its attention to developing all the possibilities in Europe outside of Russia and its aggression. Am I over interpreting this,

or is this positive? It's positive. 750 billion euros is quite a lot of money, but the aim

is to help develop these countries' agricultural base, but the infrastructure as well, and probably some defence

infrastructure too. But just reading the document, it is so complex, it is so bureaucratic,

and how the money is going to be distributed is another big issue. But the fact that Brussels

is really now putting the focus on countries like Moldova, on Georgia,

although Georgia is quite unstable at the moment, they have a very pro-Russian authoritarian

government in place. But they're looking also, but they're looking at the fringes of the

Baltic states, which are still underdeveloped.

The point about this money is that it's a shift from the traditional ways of dispersing what's called the coherent funds that would bring up less developed areas up to the standards of the wealthier countries.

But this takes an awful lot of time.

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