China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), offi cially unveiled in 2013, has been promptly placed among the top priorities of China's foreign policy. One of the BRI's cooperation priorities is unimpeded trade, which implies the improvement of the investment and trade facilitation and removal of the recurrent investment and trade barriers. Despite its apparent fl exibility and openness to embracing existing regional and multilateral platforms, there has been little debate on the compatibility of the BRI objectives with the existing economic integration projects. Th e paper is aimed at enriching this debate by addressing the relationship of the BRI with the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), a regional economic grouping bringing together several of China's important BRI partners including Russia and Central Asian countries. Th e paper addresses the current progress in bridging the two grand economic projects and outlines the priority directions for further coordination between them.
The international conflict over the events in Ukraine led to the application of unilateral restrictive measures by the parties involved – the European Union, the United States and the Russian Federation – all of which are World Trade Organization (WTO) members and permanent members of the UN Security Council. It has been alleged by all sides that specified restrictions on trade in goods and services may constitute a violation of WTO obligations. The possibility of a challenge of the restrictive measures using the WTO dispute settlement mechanism revived the debate on the invocation of security exceptions allowing WTO members to apply otherwise inconsistent measures justified by their ‘essential security interests’. The present article aims at providing a critical analysis of the restrictive measures adopted by the parties and the perspectives for invoking the security exception in case of eventual WTO dispute settlement. The article highlights the ambiguity in the interpretation of the security exceptions and questions the suitability of the WTO dispute settlement mechanism for the resolution of the current Ukraine crisis.
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