"When a lion is sick, there will always be a monkey who pulls its tail."

The Russian lion, the Polish monkey, and "new Europe's" problem:

Russian lion is not just flexing its muscles.
It has opened an attache case of cash.

Russians have bought up the Czech spa resort of Karlovy Vary and the Hungarian airline Malev.

They are fingering parts of the Czech energy giant CEZ and Hungary's biggest oil and gas firm, MOL.

They want Magyar Telecom and its subsidiaries in Macedonia and Montenegro. And that would give them access to the mobile phone calls and e-mails of a Nato member country.

This is not all new.

Six years ago, the Poles were shocked to find four fat fibre-optic cables running down a Russian gas pipeline, an information highway powerful enough to transmit the contents of 78,000 encyclopaedias a second - or simultaneously handle 38 million phone calls, according to newspapers at the time.

Read it all here.
Russia Poland Czech Republic energy oil and gas