Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine is slipping back under Kremlin control. Ukraine’s shock decision to opt for Vladimir Putin’s Russia and pull out of EU talks on the eve of an historic deal is a dramatic upset to the European balance of power. It is the first major defeat for the EU in its eastward march since the fall of Communism. While the region’s geo-politics remain fluid, the upset may prove as fateful as the move by the Kossack chief Bohdan Khmelnytsky to turn his back on the West and accept Tsarist suzerainty in the 1640s.

In a dramatic easing of its hardline stance, Russian courts granted bail this week to nineteen of the thirty Greenpeace crew members detained since September for a protest outside a Russian oil rig in the Arctic. Seven activists received the good news today, joining others who appeared in court on Monday and Tuesday, while another twelve are still awaiting custody hearings. So far, only one detainee has been set free.

Ukraine has rejected draft laws that would allow the release of a jailed opposition leader, suspended plans for a landmark agreement with the European Union and announced it will renew active dialogue with Russia. The Ukrainian parliament's failure to pass the bills on Thursday to grant freedom to the former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, took away the country's last chance to satisfy the EU's condition for stepping towards integration with the 28-member bloc.

The world's largest social network Facebook has listed Kosovo as a country more than five years after the breakaway territory proclaimed independence from Serbia, officials said Tuesday. "Facebook recognises Kosovo as a state," Minister for EU Integration Vlora Citaku wrote on Twitter. And Prime Minister Hashim Thaci said in a statement that he "was informed (on Monday) by senior Facebook executives... about including Kosovo in the global social network".

African Union and European Union countries should work together to strengthen protections for human rights defenders in Africa and migrants in Europe, Human Rights Watch said in recommendations to the AU and EU released today. The annual AU/EU human rights dialogue will be in Brussels on November 20, 2013.

There’s been a lot of talk these days that globalization is dead, even reversing — and for good reason. It seems that many of the factors that had been driving globalization have run out of steam. The growth of trade, which has long outpaced the expansion of the world economy, has slowed in recent years. Negotiations to forge a new global-trade agreement, the Doha Round through the World Trade Organization, have been stalled for years.

Josef Joffe is that rare European: a well-known and respected public intellectual, an academic with sinecures at prestigious universities on both sides of the Atlantic, the publisher-editor of the left-leaning German newspaper Die Zeit, and a staunch defender of the United States against reflexive and voguish European anti-Americanism.

Europe's unemployment crisis, now in its sixth year, has had a profound impact on young people across the Continent, and has become among the biggest economic, political and social challenges facing European leaders. Joblessness among young people is at historic highs, forcing many of them to leave their families and countries in search of jobs abroad, to accept temporary and underpaid work that often has little to do with their education and skills, and to readjust their expectations for their future.