In the lead-up to the Iraq war, Poland, Czech Republic and the six other former Soviet-bloc nations due to become EU members on May 1 sided with the US in the trans-Atlantic standoff over military action, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the former Estonian foreign minister and now a member of the country's Parliament, is quoted as saying by the WSJ. That was widely seen at the time as an expression of gratitude to and affinity for the US, but it was more an insurance policy against Russia.

Mr. Ilves made these remarks during his visit to Berlin late last year. Since then, a reassessment of Russia seems to have begun across the West, in response to concerns that Russian President Vladimir Putin is heading in an authoritarian rather than a democratic direction. Visiting Moscow last week, for example, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said publicly that he had disagreed with Mr. Putin on a range of issues from Chechnya to Russia's democratic development.

Next Monday, the 25 current and future EU foreign ministers are due to meet in Brussels to develop a more unified strategy toward Russia. According to a number of diplomats, there is a gap in the way new and old EU members approach Russia.

As an example, the WSJ refers to Poland and its defense policy. While other countries try to transform their militaries into lighter units capable of quick deployment to far-off hotspots such as Iraq, Poland's two big equipment purchases have been 128 heavy German Leopard 2 tanks in 2002, and 48 US F-16 fighter jets in 2003. Both are designed for territorial defense.

Quoting former Polish Defense Minister Janusz Onyszkiewicz, the newspaper says Poland's problem is not the threat of a Russian invasion. It is highly unlikely and if it happened, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would have time to respond. But Polish strategists worry about the possibility of a Russian punishment raid, "like when the Chinese tried to teach the Vietnamese a lesson in 1979", causing heavy damage in major Vietnamese towns along the border with China.

At their meeting on Monday, foreign ministers will also discuss a list of 14 demands that Russia says it wants met before it is willing to extend its existing EU Partnership and Cooperation Agreement to cover the 10 new accession states - the eight East European countries plus Malta and Cyprus, the WSJ reports. In past EU enlargements, such agreements - frameworks for mainly economic and political agreements - have extended automatically to include the new members.

Alexander Yakovenko, a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, said Russia simply wants to ensure that its companies don't lose out from enlargement. France or Germany would do the same in Russia's position, he added.

In particular, Russia wants EU quotas on grain and steel imports from Russia expanded to account for the 10 new markets. But other demands go further. By May 1, Russia wants a deal on the rights of Russian minorities in soon-to-be EU members Estonia and Latvia. In the view of one Brussels diplomat from a new EU country in Eastern Europe, linking these demands to enlargement - rather than dealing with them at the regular EU-Russia summit in May - amounts to "blackmail", the newspaper concluded.