Hello, I'm Paige and this is the Eurointelligence podcast covering current affairs in the EU and Euro area.

I'm joined by Wolfgang and Susanna, directors of Eurointelligence in Oxford.

Guys, it was a weird week this week.

We saw a lot of geopolitical hotspots in Europe and its periphery inching towards something that looks like a conflict.

It was really strange. In 15 years, I cannot

recall that we've ever had so many geopolitical hotspot stories in and around the EU. I mean,

we started the week talking about the Sovalki gap, which is the Polish-Lithuanian border, this 65-kilometer gap between the province of

Russian Kaliningrad and Belarus, a gap that's now becoming more important now that

Russia and Belarus are forming a political union.

But this week, we also covered conflicts arising in Bosnia, conflicts arising in Cyprus, conflicts arising in

potentially in Moldova. So we have a whole series of conflicts, and that's on top of the

conflict in eastern Ukraine and any tensions that might arise in the Black Sea. These are all

conflicts that directly or indirectly involve Russia and Turkey, even the conflict

in Bosnia does. Bosnia is interesting because it was sort of an issue people thought was settled

at a Dayton Peace Conference two decades ago. And it came up again because the Republic

of Sirbska, which is one of the two federal states of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

This is the Serb-controlled part of the north of the country and the east of the country.

They are not contingent areas.

They are sort of scattered around the country.

Some parties, shall we say, have been running an ad

campaign in favor of succession. Now, you know, we know what happened last time when that happened.

So we have the high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina came up with a warning to say that,

...