Introduction: Russia and its Near Neighbours

Abstract

Relations between the Russian Federation and the West, including especially the European Union (EU) and the United States, have fluctuated significantly over the two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.¹ After a very brief period of seemingly close collaboration, relations began to fray, as the leadership in Moscow concluded that Western states were not taking its interests seriously. But, not until the emergence of Vladimir Putin as a vigorous new leader at the turn of the millennium and the revival of the Russian economy largely as a result of exponential increases in energy demands on the global markets was Russia in the position to push its own policy agenda and to challenge Western policy objectives, including those of the US. As others have noted (Sakwa, 2009), one can detect three rather clear periods in Russian policy towards and relations with the West from 1991 through to the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The first of these covers the years 1992 to 1995 — in fact, Sakwa divides this into two separate sub-periods — when Russia first followed Western initiatives, but soon began to reassert its own interests; a second period covering 1996 to 1999 that Sakwa terms the period of ‘competitive pragmatism’; and, finally, the Putin and Medvedev years between 2000 and 2010, when Moscow clearly reasserted its autonomous policy objectives.² Russian policy towards the rest of the world underwent significant changes during these two decades, nowhere more noticeably so than in relations with both the West, which at the outset was at the centre of Russia’s foreign policy approach, and to the countries of the ‘Near Abroad’.