Moscow/Brussels - According to the world's most famous Australian soap opera, everybody needs good neighbours, because with a little understanding, you can find the perfect plan. But since the European Union enlarged to take in a swathe of former-Communist states in 2004, the "perfect plan" for dealing with its biggest neighbour, Russia, has been singularly elusive.
"Instead of the EU serving as a bridge in relations with Russia, it has become a new wall," Andrei Klimov, foreign-policy expert with the ruling United Russia party, told the German Press Agency dpa.
Western analysts might not use such harsh language, but they, too, admit that enlargement has not made EU-Russia relations any easier.
"The impact of enlargement on EU-Russia relations has been exceedingly important. It introduced hard and opposing positions on whether to engage with Russia or construct defensive arrangements," said Michael Emerson, head of security studies at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in Brussels.
In the past five years, no fewer than 10 of Moscow's former vassals have joined the EU: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia on May 1, 2004, and Bulgaria and Romania on January 1, 2007.
Those countries are deeply suspicious of the resurgent Russia, fearing that it wants to re-assert its influence over them. And their hostile stance has added a whole new layer of complexity to the EU's already tortuous attempts to forge a united foreign policy.
"The perspectives and strategic cultures of member states have become way more heterogeneous" since enlargement, pointed out Markus Kaim, head of International Security at the SWP - German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin.
Indeed, since the enlargement, EU-Russia relations have regularly been marred by clashes between the new members and Moscow.
Estonia's relations with its Russian minority, Lithuania's decision to sell an oil refinery to a Polish company rather than a Russian one, and the decisions by Poland and the Czech Republic to host a US missile-defence system have all drawn Moscow's ire.
"It's a million times easier for us to build relations with Italy or France than with our closest neighbours, and that's not right," Klimov lamented.
New EU members, in turn, have reacted with alarm to Russia's withdrawal from a key arms-control treaty and its August invasion of NATO hopeful Georgia.
"States such as Poland and the Baltics perceive Russia not as a strategic partner, in the way France, Italy and Germany do, but as a security challenge," Kaim said.
In such a tense atmosphere, it took the EU two years of wrangling to win Polish and Lithuanian approval for the start of talks on a new treaty with Russia in May 2008.
Three months later, the bloc froze the talks to protest the Georgian war - and then promptly overrode Lithuanian objections to re-start them just 10 weeks after that.
Experts say that that stop-and-start approach betrays the EU's dilemma: whether to push for better ties with Russia despite its aggressive policies, or to push for better behaviour at the cost of investment and trade.
The vacillating approach is "the usual thing when you try and find the lowest common denominator," Kaim said.
Now the diplomatic heat is on the EU's planned "Eastern Partnership" with former-Soviet neighbours Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.
The EU is set to launch the initiative at a summit in Prague on May 8 in a bid to strengthen its ties with the former USSR.
But on March 21, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused the EU of trying to build up a "sphere of influence" in the region - setting up yet another potential clash.
With so many contentious issues at stake, observers say that the enlarged EU will have its work cut out for it to come to a unified stance on Russia any time soon.
And that being the case, Europe's best hope for finding a "little understanding" with its giant neighbour may, ironically, come from one who does not live in the neighbourhood at all: the United States.
"If Washington and Moscow find common ground on, for example, arms control, regional conflicts or Afghanistan, a lot of things which have been divisive will simply lose their importance. That would make EU negotiating and decision-making much easier," Kaim said.
