The Kremlin has publicly hailed the anticlimactic choice of Herman Van Rompuy as the first permanent president of the European Council. Not out of any personal affection towards the Haiku-loving Belgian, of course, but out of pure pragmatism.

Russia’s deep-voiced Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, said Moscow hoped the Union would start to “speak with one voice” and become a “stronger, more efficient European Union”. Just like US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s famous question about “who to call if I want to call Europe”, the Kremlin says it has long despaired at the fractured nature of the Union and the complexity of striking a deal with it.

Or has it? As Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s recent trip to Paris showed, Moscow has become adept at doing juicy side-deals with friendlier member states such as France, Germany and Italy, bypassing Brussels in the process and freezing out pricklier customers such as the Baltic states and Poland. It is a classic divide-and-rule strategy that has worked well for Russia, boosting its push to build new pipelines into Europe and to woo foreign investment. Moscow would not have enjoyed such success in these areas had it been forced to deal with a single negotiator for 27 different countries. That would have meant contending with a very different amalgam of views.

So what the Kremlin really means when it says it hopes Van Rompuy can get the EU speaking with one voice is that it is hoping he can temper the voices of former Soviet satellite states the Kremlin now regards as hostile saboteurs. Russia wants a new framework treaty governing its relations with the Union and – if the terms are right – to cut a deal on energy policy. It does not want historical grudges to get in the way.

Old grievances are, however, understandably never far from the surface when it comes to Russia’s relations with Poland. To say there is little love lost between the two political elites would be an understatement.

The 1940 Katyn massacre of more than 20,000 Polish officers at the hands of the Soviets continues to cast a long shadow, as does the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that carved up Poland between Nazi Germany and the USSR, not to mention post-war Soviet dominance of Poland. From the Russian side, there are lingering complaints about the death of thousands of Red Army prisoners in Polish POW camps in 1919-20. And, thanks to Vladimir Putin, Russians mark “Unity Day” each year, celebrating the 1612 expulsion of a Polish-Lithuanian occupation army from Moscow.

It is an old and deeply felt enmity – and one that has flared up again. It began with Russia and sometime-ally Belarus holding large-scale war games in September. Before long, it was being claimed in Warsaw that the real purpose of the war games was to simulate an attack on Poland itself. Moscow said that was non......