The present contribution aims at researching the new Eurasian project on the post-Soviet area, the Eurasian Economic Union, by analyzing the legal aspects of both its institutional and economic frameworks. Because of its relatively small size, not only should the Eurasian Economic Union increase bilateral trade with its member states but also promote commerce outside the Union. In this regard, the crucial objective for success is the development of longterm relationships with its strategic partners based on mutual economic benefits and shared values. We applied the gravity model and identified not only which factors influence bilateral foreign trade, including the differences in partners? values based on a neo-institutional approach, but also analyzed those integration blocs and groups of countries to deter-mine with which partners the Eurasian Economic Union should develop strategic partnerships.

Remote rural and postindustrial regions are much more vulnerable to population drain in comparison with industrialized centers and capitals, due to obvious reasons such as meager job opportunities, difficulties in accessing public services in education, healthcare and transport, housing, entertainment, lack of integration with other territories and, finally, less advanced levels of digitalization. This represents an open challenge for the European Union within the framework of its Cohesion Policy. This paper analyzes the impact of digital trends, represented by the percentage of the population with access to internet and broadband and the percentage of individuals who buy goods and internet services (percentages provided by Eurostat) in less populated EU NUTS2 regions with lower income, on the crude population growth rate composed of natural changes in population and migratory flows and on the unemployment rate by applying panel data analysis. It has been possible to confirm that digitalization has a positive impact on natural changes in population in EU regions with lower economic development. On the contrary, the unemployment rate does not affect natural changes in population, but it does have a negative impact on migratory flows. The findings show that digitalization may contribute to reversing negative demographic trends in more disadvantaged EU regions in terms of income and population density.

Many observers were casting doubts about the existence of a strategic partnership between Russia and the European Union long before the annexation of Crimea and the subsequent strained relations between the two blocs. Nevertheless, the main challenge of this article is to prove that there was indeed a positive effect regarding the strategic partnership on bilateral trading – together with such factors as the growth of the Russian and EU GDPs per capita, the devaluation of the Russian currency and the oil price increase – by applying the Gravity Model. Based on this model, it was also confirmed that there was a negative effect of the geographical distance and sanctions between parties on the EU–Russia trade flow. Moreover, we tried to predict by means of the Error Correction Models how EU–Russia bilateral trade would have changed according to a scenario wherein the parties continued being strategic partners, and had the sanctions not been imposed. As such, and by the method described, not only was it empirically confirmed that the major partners would have received the most benefit from the strategic partnership with Russia but even Russia’s smaller trading partners are incurring significant welfare losses from sanctions, along with Russia itself.

The European Union awarded the special status of strategic partner to ten states. Its key partners are dissimilar in political philosophies and structure, power status, ethical values, economic development, unequal in size and mineral reserves. Some of them are traditional Post-Second World War partners while the others have established recent partnerships in a new multipolar world order. However, from the very beginning the EU Conception of Strategic Partnership was just an assemblage of political statements without any official definition and clear established criteria for being chosen as a strategic partner. In this regard, this paper aims to analyze the strategic partnership phenomenon in EU Foreign Policy and provide our own definition of the term with a view to underpin it subsequently by common criteria. Based upon obtained main components the Binary Logistic Model was applied, which not only did allow to make the election of EU strategic partners more science-based but also propose the potential EU partners.