At the beginning of XX century Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, in his Pan-Europa (1923)as in the following “Open Letter to members French Parliament” (1924), stated that Europe needs to unify in order to confront three major challenges: Soviet Union, British Commonwealth and United States. The European unity realised in 1950 evolved until today, and it seems that the three challenges highlighted by Coudenhove-Kalergi are almost the same, although the Soviet Union, British Commonwealth and United States changed themselves. Regarding Russia, the partly successor of USSR, after a period when it diminished its international influence, it seems now to recover at least partly its place. If USSR was ever a difficult and unpredictable dialogue partner, actual Russia is not a comfortable one. How EU succeeds to manage the relationship with Russia represents the objective of our paper, and will be approached especially from EU conditionality perspective in the space of ENP/EAP. By our approach we will focus both on EU and Russia efforts to obtain and increase or to maintain and increase their influence in the region of ENP/EaP countries.
