European press review

The papers comment on the early start to campaigning in the German elections and Turkish reforms.

In Russia, the focus is on the prospect of another bumper grain harvest and the possibility of war between Russia and Georgia.

Germany's Berliner Zeitung feels underwhelmed about Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder launching his re-election campaign three weeks early.

"The question is," the paper wonders, "whether this will help at all."

It thinks bringing forward the election campaign only highlights the loss of direction and uncertainty of Mr Schroeder's Social Democrats, the SPD.

"The SPD does not really know what it wants and it is reacting increasingly frantically to external irritations."

The paper believes "the weaknesses of its opponent, not its own abilities" will "save the election victory" for the SPD.

Munich's Sueddeutsche Zeitung believes the intended US strike against Iraq is a central theme of the election campaign, even though opposition candidate Edmund Stoiber "warns against drawing the Iraq conflict into the election campaign".

Chancellor Schroeder and his party, it says, have not shied away from the subject.

To reform or not to reform

"Something really important happened in Ankara at dawn on 3 August," France's Le Monde says, commenting on the EU-oriented reforms launched by Turkey that day.

"Something which may be an historic turning point for this Muslim country, pillar of Nato at the crossroads between Europe and Asia and EU candidate".

The Europeans "rightly welcomed these reforms", which are "in the right direction," the paper says.

"In the current context of suspicion about Islam, they prove that a Muslim country can choose democratic reform," it adds. "They show the attractive power of the EU."

"Everything will depend on whether the Turkish military hierarchy, which is still extremely powerful, decides to hamper these changes or not, to give free rein to democracy," concludes Le Monde.

Finnish Swedish-language daily Hufvudstadsbladet notes that the reforms have been welcomed by all of Turkey's friends, "particularly the USA".

"The USA will soon need bases in Nato member Turkey for a forthcoming attack on Iraq," it adds.

Russia's grain mountain

In each of its issues the moderate left-wing paper Trud has a feature called "Number" on its front page, consisting of a number in large white letters against a black background and a short paragraph explaining what that number represents.

Today's number is 38.1m. The accompanying paragraph tells us that this is the number of tonnes of grain which Russian farmers had harvested and threshed by 5 August.

This figure, the paper says, is 3.4m tonnes more than at the same time last year. Furthermore, the Russian Ministry of Agriculture is predicting that Russia will gather between 73m and 76m tonnes of grain this year.

In a report captioned "Will Russia drown in grain?" the government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta illustrates the story with a picture of a fetching young maiden in peasant clothing.

"Russia may repeat last year's record and gather about 85m tonnes of grain," it proclaims.

The only problem, the paper says, is that "there is nowhere to store the grain".

For its part the Moscow tabloid Moskovskiy Komsomolets says that "the dream of every Russian is gradually starting to come true".

"The weather is ceasing to be an influence on Russian agriculture," it explains. From being totally dependent on grain imports, Russia is starting to become a "solid" exporter, adds the tabloid.

The business broadsheet Vedomosti agrees, describing the increase in Russian exports this year as "astronomical".

No comparison

Several papers carry graphic accounts of the latest fighting in the Kerigo Gorge of southern Chechnya between Russian border guards and Chechen rebels who have infiltrated from the Pankisi Gorge, across the border in Georgia.

Moskovskiy Komsomolets focuses on the death, at the hands of a sniper, of Maj Sergey Popov, the commander of the Russian border post which found itself in the thick of the fighting.

It says the rebels are well-trained and well-equipped too.

"The border guards can only envy the fighters' radio communications and other equipment," it says, adding that Russian soldiers "wear standard-issue army boots, although special mountain boots are needed in the highlands".

"Even though it is the height of summer, our soldiers have to eat tinned rations," the paper says.

Hot pursuit into Georgia?

Moskovskiy Komsomolets devotes a long article to the friction between Russia and Georgia which, it says, could explode into war.

"Last week's protracted 'positional warfare' between Moscow and Tbilisi," it says, "threatened to turn into formal hostilities, with a Russian assault on the Pankisi Gorge, which is teeming with Chechen fighters but which is, nevertheless, Georgian territory."

"But in the event, things did not go beyond diplomatic exchanges of fire," the paper adds.

It wonders whether the Russian army would have been capable of mounting its own "Pankisi Storm" operation.

The European press review is compiled by BBC Monitoring from internet editions of the main European newspapers and some early printed editions.