Soft Pomeron in QCD

This is a talk, given at Diffraction'2000, Sept. 2 - 7, Centraro, Italy. This talk is a brief presentation of our view on the Pomeron, as a non-perturbative QCD phenomenon but from sufficiently short distances. Our approach is based on the scale anomaly of QCD and emphasizes the r{\^o}le of semi-classical QCD vacuum fields. We show that both the intercept and the slope of Pomeron trajectory appear to be determined by the energy density of non-perturbative QCD vacuum. The particular example of semi-classical QCD vacuum fields is discussed based on a new type of instanton-induced interactions (``instanton ladder'') that leads to the rising with energy cross section $\sigma \sim s^{\Delta_P}$ of Regge type (the Pomeron).