ABSTRACT
St. Petersburg regions. The former is surrounded by EU territory and has the potential to
“skew the development of the Baltic region” (European Commission, undated, p. 8). The
latter forms the largest metropolitan conurbation in the Baltic Sea macro-region (it has a
similarly sized population to the Baltic States as a whole) and is one of the economically
most advanced regions in the Russian Federation (Razumeyko, 2011), giving it in an
important potential economic position for the Baltic region as a whole. To date,
however, Russia has not played a very active role in the development and implementation
of the macro-regional strategy for the Baltic and has not taken on the responsibility for
coordinating any of the actions. In the Danube region, on the other hand, various non-
EU countries have been actively involved in the development of the strategy and have
taken on similar levels of responsibility as EU member states in the implementation of
the strategy. Time will tell whether Russia chooses to play a fuller part in future European
territorial cooperation initiatives for the Baltic region, and whether this will lead to the
Europeanization of Russian territory. While some regions in north-west Russia are quite
open to cooperation with their Baltic neighbours (e.g. the Novgorod and Pskov regions,
where trade relations with the Baltic States have existed for centuries), the national
view from Moscow on cooperation with the Baltic States is currently rather different.
