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The Evolution of Russian Foreign Policy in the

1990s
Allen C Lynch
Published online: 29 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: Allen C Lynch (2002) The Evolution of Russian Foreign Policy in the 1990s, Journal of
Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 18:1, 161-182

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13523270209696372

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 181jcs10.qxd 02/05/2002 14:41 Page 161

The Evolution of Russian Foreign Policy

in the 1990s
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A L L E N C . LY N C H

Throughout most of the 1990s, the framework for partnership between

Russia and the industrial democracies that had been established by Mikhail
Gorbachev in conjunction with US and West European leaders continued to
inform the priorities and direction of Russian foreign policy. The primary
question in the Russian–Western relationship soon after the Soviet Union’s
collapse concerned the breadth and depth of Russian co-operation with the
North Atlantic world, not the centrality of co-operation itself. Looked at
from the angle of Russian–American relations, the periodicity and shift in
focus of nearly two dozen Russian (and Soviet)–American summit meetings
since the spectacular but doomed Reykjavik meeting between Gorbachev
and Reagan in October 1986 corresponds to the shifting contours of the
Russian–American relationship itself. The geopolitical focus and realist
assumptions of the early Reagan era eventually yielded to an increasing
preoccupation with the internal consequences of Soviet disintegration and
Russian economic and political transformations.
The Russian policy elite, for its part, welcomed not only the
fundamentally warmer diplomatic relationship with the United States but
also the American effort to assist Russia’s internal transformation to post-
Soviet forms of politics and economics and also to integrate the post-Soviet
Russian state into the North Atlantic political economy and security system
(as they thought at the time), in what was understood to be a mutually
reinforcing dynamic. By early 1997, the integrationist premises of Russian
policy toward the United States were largely discredited in the light of the
evidently unstoppable momentum of extending NATO membership to
former Soviet allies in Eastern Europe and the unsatisfactory consequences
of Russia’s alleged liberal experiment in politics and economics of the
previous five years. Any doubts in Russia on this score were removed in
the wake of NATO’s war in Serbia in the spring of 1999. How are we to
understand this evolution in Russian relations with the G-7 world? How
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162 RUSSIA AFTER COMMUNISM

decisive is the break in the pattern of relations established in the late

1990s? What are its implications for the future contours of Moscow’s
relations with the advanced industrial democracies?
Russian–Western partnership – that is, the idea that Russia and the West
are involved in a joint enterprise to advance important common interests
and values – has been based upon two factors which, while not entirely
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absent during the cold war, have assumed much greater prominence in
shaping Russian–Western interactions. These are, first, that each side’s vital
and primary interests are not at heart incompatible with those of the other;
second, and more novel, that there exists a positive compatibility of
interests and values that can underwrite a relationship that goes beyond a
simple détente. To take up the first factor, it is apparent – and Western
leaders have gone out of their way to demonstrate by word and deed, by
acts of commission and omission – that the NATO (and EU) states do not
see their own vital or even primary interests threatened by those of the
Russian Federation. Russia’s vital interests are understood to include:
(i) preservation of the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation
itself;
(ii) assuring the geopolitical primacy of Russia in the region described
by the borders of the former USSR;
(iii) assuring the security and stability of Russian nuclear weapons and
other weapons of mass destruction;
(iv) promoting Russian economic development;
(v) maintaining Russia’s status as a great international power; and
(vi) asserting the maximum feasible peerage with the G-7 group of
advanced industrial democracies.

By comparison, key Western interests with respect to Russia are not in

conflict with those Russian interests enumerated above, namely:
(i) ensuring that no hostile, hegemonic power might emerge in Eurasia
that could threaten international security throughout Western Europe
and the East Asian–Pacific rim;
(ii) ensuring the security and stability of the Russian nuclear arsenal, and
that of other weapons of mass destruction located across Russian and
post-Soviet space;
(iii) a belief that conflict and instability throughout Russia’s vital post-
Soviet ‘geopolitical space’, however troubling, does not warrant the
commitment of serious G-7 politico-military, economic, or even
diplomatic resources;
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RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLICY IN THE 1990s 163

(iv) supporting the continued territorial and political integrity of the
Russian Federation, in part in order to ensure effective control over
weapons of mass destruction; and
(v) supporting Russian economic ‘reforms’, in the conviction that
‘liberal’ reforms, by liberalizing Russia internally, would lay the
foundation for long-term harmony in Russian–Western relations as
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well as satisfying certain specific economic interests, for example

that of the West Europeans in reliable long-term supplies of Russian
natural gas.

This is not to say that there have not been serious conflicts of interest
in Russian–G-7 relations throughout the 1990s but rather that such
conflicts that have arisen have tended to occur and to be addressed within
a framework of relations in which, negatively, neither side’s vital interests
are seen as conflicting with those of the other and, positively, that each
side has been engaged in a common pursuit of values as well as interests
that induces each to see specific conflicts within a broader developmental
framework for Russian–Western relations. In the case of the bilateral
Russian–US relationship, this shared broader conviction very quickly led
to the establishment of a formal institutional body, the Gore–
Chernomyrdin commission led by the US vice-president and the then
Russian prime minister, that has served to address and where necessary to
insulate emerging specific conflicts in Russian–American relations from
poisoning the more general ties between Washington and Moscow.
Indeed, this commission was just one of several institutionalized
arrangements for the transaction of Russian–Western relations in the
1990s. To it should be added the Contact Group of major powers with
respect to the various Balkan wars since 1994; the ‘G-7 plus 1’ group of
economic powers that has sought to mollify Russian concerns about its
great power status; the highly structured and professionalized
collaboration between Russian and American militaries in the field of
nuclear weapons dismantlement; and the fateful NATO–Russian Charter
of May 1997. At heart, and running through each of these separate forums,
has been the following question: to what extent has Russia’s institutional
participation in Western – and in particular in US-dominated –
international agencies been substantive rather than symbolic in character?
More crudely put, have Russia and the G-7 states been able to find a way
to transact their business with each other in ways that do not simply reflect
the gross imbalance in international power, across virtually every
dimension, in favour of the latter?
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164 RUSSIA AFTER COMMUNISM

The Evolution of Russia’s Foreign Policy Debate

The initial premises of the Russian Federation’s policy towards Western
Europe and the United States were rooted in the liberal internationalism
eloquently expressed by Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev.1 At heart, argued
Kozyrev, Russia’s international interests paralleled those of the democratic
world and were to a large extent a reflection of Russia’s democratic
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aspirations. From this (liberal) ideological perspective, ‘the past ten years
[i.e., 1982–92] have not been a period of eclipse but a struggle against the
inhuman communist regime. Russians … exerted all their strength to defeat
the [communist] party and rejoin other nations on the path to civilization.
The logical conclusion of this struggle would be Russia’s unification with
the West.’2 On these premises, Russia required the maximum feasible
economic and political co-operation, if not integration, with the international
political economy (and security community) of the industrial democracies.
Russian liberals concluded from these postulates that Russia must itself
observe international norms of behaviour or face the likelihood of exclusion
from that international community. In this eventuality, Russia’s own
prospects for democratic development would be seriously compromised.
Russia could not therefore afford to alienate the West; likewise, Russia
could expect major gains from integration into liberal international
institutions and regimes. Russia’s initially liberal–internationalist approach
to foreign policy afforded the West enormous potential influence over the
international conduct of the Russian Federation, should it have chosen to
exercise it. Russia wanted to be in, and believed that both its domestic and
international interests would be grievously affected were it to be left out.
However, it quickly became apparent to Russian policy-makers that,
whatever Russia’s real chances for integration into the Western political
economy and security community, there were far more pressing issues – all
unexpected, all unplanned for – throughout Russia’s immediate post-Soviet
periphery. These included the presence of former Soviet strategic nuclear
weapons now based on the soil of independent Ukraine, Belarus and
Kazakhstan; the disruption of economic ties in what had been an
extraordinarily interdependent economic space (perhaps a third or more of
the post-Soviet economic depression is thought to be a direct result of the
disintegration of the USSR);3 the outbreak of wars, secession movements
and streams of refugees along Russia’s borderlands, especially in the
Caucasus; and finally the realization that, literally overnight, tens of
millions of Soviet Russians found themselves living as foreigners or
national minorities in the newly independent non-Russian states.
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RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLICY IN THE 1990s 165

The Russian foreign ministry had no real concept for dealing with the
new international relations of the post-Soviet era. An enormous policy
vacuum now existed. Combined with the belated shock in Russia at the
disintegration of the USSR, and with it of the historic framework for the
projection of Russian power in the world, a political reaction against
Kozyrev’s liberal democratic foreign policy began as early as mid-1992 (as
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was also true in respect of economic policy). This nationalist reaction,

which had seen the former foreign minister himself artfully tack his policy
boat in keeping with the new political winds, was fuelled by a set of
mutually reinforcing foreign policy problems. These included (i) the
inevitable frustration of Russia’s hopes for rapid political, economic and
security integration with the West and the apparently meagre if not counter-
productive effects of Western economic assistance; (ii) the very real and
urgent challenges of dealing with the novel problems of international
relations among the 15 former union republics of the USSR; and (iii) the
rapid realization that the United States and Western Europe would neither
help nor seriously impede Russia in devising responses to the problems of
instability and regional conflicts along Russia’s new international frontier.
As a consequence, the Russian foreign policy debate quickly became
polarized along liberal and nationalist lines, building upon the belated
reaction to Gorbachev’s foreign policy in 1990–91 and to a certain extent
reflecting the old divide between Russian Slavophiles and Westernizers.
In this debate, Foreign Minister Kozyrev defended the liberal premises
and Western orientation of Russian foreign policy against an increasingly
assertive opposition. That opposition was led in its moderate wing by the
Russian vice-president, Aleksandr Rutskoi, and the parliamentary
Speaker, Ruslan Khasbulatov, who urged a reorientation of Russian
foreign policy towards the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)
and the re-establishment there of old Soviet economic and security, if not
political, ties; and in its extremist wing by the former presidential
candidate Vladimir Zhirinovskii, who called for the outright re-
establishment of a unitary Russian empire, come what may.
At first, this debate suggested that the main foreign policy options
facing Russia were mutually exclusive. That is, Russia must either choose
the primacy of the West in its foreign policy orientation, and respect the
postulates of international law in its dealings with its former Soviet
neighbours, or opt for its own primacy within the Commonwealth of
Independent States, seeking to establish Russian dominance in what was
now referred to as the old ‘Soviet geopolitical space’, in the process
relinquishing the benefits of co-operation with the West. It turned out that
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166 RUSSIA AFTER COMMUNISM

both the liberals and the nationalists had an exaggerated understanding of

Western interests, capabilities and intentions. It soon became apparent to
perceptive observes (such as Andranik Migranyan, a member of the
Presidential Council) that the West would not necessarily compel Russia to
choose between its twin, and potentially competing, interests in partnership
with the West and predominance in the Commonwealth of Independent
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States. In brief, the West was viewed as being unwilling, if not unable, to
provide either sufficient ‘carrots’ to reinforce the position of Russian
liberals or sufficient ‘sticks’ to weaken the position of Russian nationalists.
In fact, as a detailed analysis of the course of Russian foreign policy
since then demonstrates, Russian diplomacy has proved to be far from the
picture of a unilateralist, anti-Western and generally ineffective statecraft
suggested by some of the scholarly literature, much of the journalistic
analysis, and the Russian government’s domestic opponents. A close
reading of Russian foreign policy since 1991 indicates instead a diplomacy
that has proved relatively successful in maintaining two important policy
objectives that are in potential contradiction with each other: namely,
establishing Russian diplomatic and security hegemony throughout the
territory of the former Soviet Union in addition to Russia’s ‘great power’
status in international councils, while at the same time avoiding a rupture
with the G-7 states, in the first place the United States, whose co-operation
remains essential to Russia’s internal as well as external prospects.
Students of the history of Soviet foreign policy, as of international
relations in general, should not find such a development surprising.
Ideologically driven states have frequently, if not usually, been
constrained to adapt their global visions to the realities of inter-state
power politics and the tension between a general ideological mission and
a particular state interest. Indeed, the parallels between the evolution of
Russian foreign policy in the 1990s and that of Soviet foreign policy in the
1920s are quite striking. Each case is characterized by:

(i) an apparently clean break with the past (that is, Soviet repudiation of
capitalism and Russian repudiation of communism, respectively);
(ii) a strong tendency to define interests ideologically, thereby
transcending the historical tension between Russia and the West and
providing for Russian security and economic development (by a
socialist integration with Europe in the first case and a liberal
integration with the North Atlantic world in the second);
(iii) early realizations that the West was not ripe for the kind of
ideologically based alliance with Russia advocated by both the early
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RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLICY IN THE 1990s 167

Soviet leaders and the post-Soviet liberal reformers (including
Acting Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar in domestic policy and Foreign
Minister Andrei Kozyrev in foreign policy);
(iv) consequently, rapid adaptation in each case in order to assume the
responsibilities of more traditional, statist diplomacy without in the
process fully relinquishing the original ideological compass: still, a
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clear priority of statist over internationalist goals now prevailed, the

latter now being defined in terms of the former, instead of vice versa,
as was initially the case. This tendency towards the rise of statist
over internationalist considerations in Russian foreign policy is well
illustrated by a comparison of Russia’s policy under foreign
ministers of two quite distinct sensibilities, the liberal reformer
Andrei Kozyrev and state-realist Yevgeny Primakov.

Primakov versus Kozyrev?

The replacement of Andrei Kozyrev by Yevgenii Primakov as Foreign
Minister in January 1996 was widely hailed as signalling a shift in Russian
diplomacy from a Western-oriented to a Eurasian-oriented foreign policy.
Kozyrev’s liberal internationalism4 appeared to be discredited by the
improbability of Russia’s early integration into the broader liberal-
democratic international community. The prospect of the entry of
erstwhile Soviet satellite states of Poland, Hungary and (after the splitting
of the Czechoslovak federation in 1993) the Czech Republic into NATO
appeared to underline – or so argued most Russians concerned about the
issue – the centrality of classical geopolitical rather than liberal criteria in
post-cold war international relations.5 The appointment of Primakov, with
deep roots in the Soviet foreign policy and intelligence bureaucracies and
having just served as head of a KGB-successor unit, the Federal
Intelligence Service, presaged a renewed focus on securing for Russia the
status of global power with Eurasia and further afield that Kozyrev had
seemed to neglect, in his vociferous advocacy of the proposition that
Russia’s national interests flowed from its liberal-democratic aspirations.
Indeed, contrary to this liberal school, Primakov had on several occasions
declared that Russia should pay the economic price for reintegrating the
old empire, directly or indirectly; great power status did not come cheaply
and was worth the cost.6 Consequently, many expected that Primakov’s
appointment would see a marked anti-Western turn in Russian diplomacy,
as the establishment of Russian primacy in central Eurasia had apparently
become a higher priority than relations with the G-7 world.
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168 RUSSIA AFTER COMMUNISM

Such interpretations, which reflected a broad anti-Kozyrev consensus

within the Russian parliament and throughout much of the government
itself, discounted the fact that Kozyrev had presided over a type of
Russian diplomacy that was far more complex and balanced than his
critics were prepared to accept. After early disillusionment about the
likelihood of Russia’s integration into the G-7 community (prompting an
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extraordinary mock hostile speech to the foreign ministers of the

Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in Stockholm in
December 1992),7 Kozyrev steered a weak Russian state through a series
of diplomatic engagements in which Russia proved capable of asserting
its interest in primacy within the Commonwealth of Independent States
(CIS), in acquiring the trappings of great power status further afield, and
in advancing its material interests in the face of US protests without in the
process undermining its relationships with the United States and its most
powerful allies. Throughout the southern CIS, ranging from civil conflicts
within Moldova, Georgia and Tajikistan to war between Armenia and
Azerbaijan, Russia had succeeded between 1992 and 1995 in asserting its
claim to be the privileged interlocutor between these states and the world
beyond the old Soviet frontiers.8
Russian military power, such as it was, and the will of the Russian state
to employ it, underwrote the state’s claim that Russia’s security borders
were those of the defunct Soviet Union.9 In the Balkans, Russia vetoed the
US proposal to lift the arms embargo on former Yugoslavia in respect of
Bosnia in the UN Security Council in summer 1993 and succeeded within
the year to negotiate membership in the five-power Contact Group, a kind
of regional adaptation of the Security Council that excludes the one
permanent member with no specific interest in the Balkans (China) and
includes one major power with such interests that is not a permanent
member (Germany). Russian membership in the Contact Group provides
a clear example of the complexity of Russian diplomacy under Kozyrev:
Russian inclusion testifies to Russia’s successful balancing of a frequently
pro-Serbian orientation with functional relations with the West, and the
United States in particular; moreover, the central purpose of the Contact
Group has been to ensure that the potentially conflicting interests of
Russia, France, Great Britain, Germany and the United States on Balkan
issues do not undermine the relations of these powers with one another. In
this respect, the Contact Group testifies both to Russia’s desire to pursue
potentially conflicting policy lines – that is, the assertion of great power
status together with cultivation of close ties with the United States and its
allies – and to its ability to do so.
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RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLICY IN THE 1990s 169

That Russia has not very often been compelled to choose between these
two lines of policy certainly reflects the more permissive international
environment that has emerged since the end of the Cold War. West
European and North American powers have generally been reluctant to
press Russia forcefully to observe important international legal and political
norms. Examples include the use of the Russian army to underwrite the de
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facto secession of Transnistria from Moldova (or of Abkhazia from

Georgia), the observance of OSCE rules on troop movements on the eve of
the invasion of Chechnya (as well as the conduct of the Russian army
during the Chechen war), and reckless statements by Russian officials,
including the president (who declared in September 1995 that NATO
expansion would mean the return of ‘the flames of war’ to Europe). The
same applies even where Russian commercial interests conflict with long-
standing US (as well as US–Soviet) non-proliferation policy, as in the sale
to Iran of $800 million worth of nuclear reactors by the Russian ministry of
atomic energy.10 The fact remains that Russian diplomacy under Kozyrev’s
tenure proved able to identify the margin of manoeuvre potentially available
to Russia and very frequently – much more than Russia’s gravely weakened
economy, military and state would imply – advanced its twin interests in
predominance within the CIS and good relations with the G-7 states.
Even on the issue of NATO expansion, where to be sure Russian
diplomacy failed in obtaining its declared objectives, Russian protests
helped to delay the timing of expansion and to obtain in compensation
(under Primakov’s tenure as foreign minister) NATO commitments not to
station nuclear or conventional forces of existing NATO states to new
members in East–Central Europe plus Russian membership of a permanent
joint Russia–NATO Council.11 From early 1993 onwards, Kozyrev
consistently maintained that any eventual extension of the NATO alliance
eastward had to be rooted in a broader concept and framework of European
security, taking Russia’s special status as a nuclear power into account.12
That such a framework was codified under Primakov should not obscure the
strong lines of continuity between these putatively ‘liberal’ and ‘realist’
foreign ministers, as the following case studies of Russian policy towards
Eastern and Central Europe, the European Union, and NATO’s war in
Serbia will illustrate in some detail.

Russian Policy to Eastern Europe in the Light of Russia’s Relations

with the G-7 States
The first thing to say about Russian policy towards Eastern Europe in light
of the region’s progressive integration with the G-7 world, as expressed
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170 RUSSIA AFTER COMMUNISM

through the twin expansions of the European Union and of NATO, is that
there has not been much of a Russian policy towards Eastern Europe as
such:13 as was also true of Soviet policy in the late Gorbachev period, Russian
policy towards Eastern Europe has been subordinated to its broader
Westpolitik. Moreover, a weak Russian state has disposed of very limited
instruments with which to shape a policy consistent with the expressed pre-
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ferences of the Russian foreign policy elite, namely a neutral Eastern Europe.
Soviet and then Russian preoccupations in 1991 and immediately after
the Soviet Union’s disintegration were not conducive to a reformulated set
of policy assumptions and practices towards Eastern Europe. As Margot
Light has observed,
The new government in Russia was preoccupied with domestic
affairs, the urgent need for Western assistance and relations within the
CIS. As for the opponents of the new regime, both the Communist old
guard and the Russian nationalists were more concerned with the
possibility of reinstating the inner empire (the Soviet Union) than with
attempts to reconstitute the Soviet zone of influence in Eastern
Europe. Later, when it became likely that a number of former Soviet
allies would join NATO, Russians of all political persuasions grew
alarmed that Russian security would be undermined.14
Russian policy towards Eastern Europe has been overwhelmingly
influenced by broader considerations relating to Russia’s relations with
Western Europe and North America – what I shall call for our purposes
the G-7 world. It has been, initially, Russia’s hopes for economic, political
and strategic integration with that G-7 world, and more recently
apprehension about the consequences of NATO expansion into Eastern
Europe, that have defined the place of Eastern Europe on Moscow’s
foreign policy horizons.
There is a certain irony here, since it was precisely such considerations
of Westpolitik that stayed Soviet hands from constraining the East
European states’ move towards full independence in the first place:
In a situation where Gorbachev and his colleagues were pleading for
Western aid … and trying to entice direct Western investment and
applying for membership of [G-7] international economic institutions
… the implicit rule about respecting spheres of influence became
untenable. … In essence, the relationship with the West was considered
so important to Soviet transformation that it could not be risked, even
if this meant losing the USSR’s European sphere of influence.15
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RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLICY IN THE 1990s 171

Even as the Russian policy elite reacted with increasing alarm at the
prospective inclusion of former Soviet allies in NATO, it was clear that they
were not concerned about the political and economic changes that
had occurred in East–Central Europe, nor did they hope to include
these countries in a Russian sphere of influence. They did object
to the exclusion of Russia from the new European security
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architecture, and to the likely proximity of NATO to the borders of

the former Soviet Union. While Moscow has clearly wished to limit
the foreign policy choices of former WTO members, there is no
indication that it has considered the domestic structure of these
countries its concern.16
By framing its Eastern European policy almost exclusively in terms of
Westpolitik, specifically NATO expansion, Russia has tended both to
accelerate its own isolation in the region and to overlook an approach to
Eastern Europe that is more in keeping with Russia’s actual possibilities:
that is, to develop its bilateral relations in the region in such a way as to
make their health distinct from the question of institutional forms.17 Of
course, to do that would imply that Russia has come to terms with the fact
that it is no longer a great power but merely a large one and that it should
correspondingly aspire to become a normal rather than an exceptional
actor in the international system. Too many – although not all – of
Russia’s foreign policy elite have refused to come to terms with this fact.
Thus, ‘the [Russian] complaint that … there were virtually no policies
towards or serious analyses of Eastern Europe accurately reflected the
situation in academic and policy fields’.18

Russia and the European Union

The extension of the European Union eastwards is not per se an issue for
Russia. Russia itself is anxious to join the EU ‘bandwagon’, if one in fact
exists. Russian foreign trade officials have even argued that ‘[i]t is not so
important at this stage whether Russia joins the EU’, so long as the
substance of economic rapprochement is developed.19 Indeed, today the
EU is Russia’s most important trading partner, accounting for fully 40 per
cent of Russia’s foreign trade, compared with eight per cent for Eastern
and Central Europe and four per cent for the United States. Excluding
Russian trade within the CIS, its trade with the EU constitutes more than
half of the country’s foreign trade turnover.20 Russia sells more than ten
per cent of its GDP on the West European market,21 so it takes little
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172 RUSSIA AFTER COMMUNISM

imagination to deduce that Russian trade with the EU accounts for a

disproportionate amount of Russia’s hard currency earnings and federal
budget capacity. From the opposite perspective, more than 30 per cent of
Western Europe’s natural gas deliveries come from Russia, as does some
20 per cent of the EU’s supply of oil and petroleum products, and even
nuclear fuel; this relationship is bound to deepen in the coming decades.22
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Moreover, the West European market is relatively open for Russian goods:
the average customs duty on Russian imports into the EU is one per cent,
while 80 per cent of goods are imported duty-free. (Tariffs tend to be
higher on Russian industrial compared with raw materials exports.) An
additional ten per cent of exports are covered by a system of preferences
that cuts customs duties by half on average.23
Having said this, it is nevertheless true that the trade consequences
of the Soviet Union’s disintegration, which are magnified by the
reorientation of East European trade westwards, are quite dramatic and
underline Russia’s progressive isolation from the European mainstream.
‘Partnership with the EU has not shielded Russia from the unfavorable
consequences of the more privileged trade relations already established
between the EU’ and the Eastern European states.24 Already by 1993, the
dollar value of Soviet and then Russian trade with the CMEA states
declined from more than $126 million in 1989 to less than $11 million in
1993; as a proportion of total Soviet or Russian trade, CMEA trade had
dropped from 57 per cent to 14 per cent between 1989 and 1993. Most of
that slack was made up by the reorientation of both East European and
Russian trade with the states of the EU, where Russia’s dependence on
trade is quite marked.25 Whereas EU trade accounts for 40 per cent of
Russian foreign trade (or as we have noted about 10 per cent of the
Russian GDP), Russian trade accounts for just five per cent of EU external
trade, a discrepancy ratio of 8 : 1. In the Baltic region, the foreign trade of
the three Baltic states with the EU far outstrips trade with Russia,
accounting for about half or more of the foreign trade of Estonia, Latvia
and Lithuania. Estonian exports to the EU in 1998 exceeded exports to
Russia by a factor of 3.5 : 1, while for imports the corresponding ratio was
5.5 : 1; for Latvia, these ratios were 3.7 : 1 and 4.5 : 1, and for Lithuania
they were 1.5 : 1 and 2.2 : 1, respectively.26 Let us note, too, that the total
dollar value of Russian foreign trade is equivalent to that of Denmark,
while the commercial value of the Russian economy as a whole is
comparable to that of Holland. In short, Russia is increasingly absent from
the international economy of Eastern Europe and increasingly dependent
on that of Western Europe.
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RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLICY IN THE 1990s 173

Relations with the states of the EU are not the issue for Russia. Rather,
Russian analysts see a major challenge posed by the manner in which EU
integration and expansion eastwards has been taking place. For example,
the accelerating rapprochement of the EU and the Baltic States is seen in
Russia as expanding the borders of preferential trade in industrial goods
eastwards, to the exclusion of Russian manufacturing. The ‘structured
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dialogue’ through which EU members consider pan-European problems

without Russia is seen as implicitly creating the danger of Russia’s
economic isolation from Europe.27 Indeed, ‘Baltic membership in the
European Union … will have profound consequences for Russia,
accelerating the reorientation of trade away from Russia and potentially
erecting new barriers between it and the Baltics. … EU rule and policies
cannot but help but affect Russian access to Baltic markets and ports … ’,28
quite apart from the security implications of EU membership.
Even so, on the formal level, Russian policy and attitudes towards the
European Union cannot be compared with those towards NATO. Indeed,
Yevgenii Primakov, while foreign minister, stated that ‘Russia’s attitude to
the Baltic countries’ possible membership in the European Union is
positive’.29 The problem is that the expansion of both the European Union
and NATO are core parts of a process of European (and more broadly G-
7 led) integration, and this, if it does not formally exclude Russia, finds
Russia on the margins, as befits a state of its limited economic and
administrative capacities. NATO’s war in Serbia in the spring of 1999
demonstrated this with remarkable clarity.

NATO’s War Against Serbia, March–June 1999

In spite of years of often histrionic protests, the Russian government, with
Yevgenii Primakov as foreign minister, acquiesced in the inevitability of
NATO expansion, as reflected in the Russian–NATO Charter of May
1997. In exchange, Russia and NATO worked out a parallel relationship
involving a permanent joint Russia–NATO Council that for the first time
allowed Russia a voice in the internal deliberations of NATO. Very
quickly thereafter, the question of NATO expansion was largely defused
in the domestic politics of Russian foreign policy, while Russia continued
to co-operate with NATO and its member-states on a range of issues,
including Russian peacekeeping troops under NATO command in
Bosnia.30 The crucial question remained, however: was the NATO–Russia
accord an agreement on the substance of Russia’s participation in NATO
councils or was it mainly a symbolic concession to Russian pride that
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174 RUSSIA AFTER COMMUNISM

concealed Russian capitulation to superior NATO power? The answer was

forthcoming shortly, in the Balkans.
NATO’s war against Serbia in the spring of 1999 provoked the loudest,
most intemperate and sustained Russian protests against the West since
the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Terms such as ‘aggression’,
‘barbaric’, ‘diktat’, ‘genocide’ and ‘Natocolonialism’ were regularly
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employed by Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov in his prepared remarks at

press conferences, while comparisons were often made with the
destruction rained on Yugoslavia in the Second World War, evoking strong
emotions of pro-Serb (and anti-NATO) sympathy in Russian society.31
While Russian officials took pains always to refer to Yugoslav ‘President’
Miloševic, Russia’s President Yeltsin spoke rudely of just ‘Clinton’ twice
in his first televised address to the Russian people on the war.32 The
Russian government broke off its participation in the joint Russia–NATO
Council, while, perhaps for the first time, broad elements in Russian
society became deeply affected by a foreign policy issue, evidently seeing
Russia’s own past (and future?) in the plight of a Belgrade once again, as
in 1941, under aerial bombardment.33
In fact, NATO’s Balkan war was a traumatic event for the Russian
government in ways that previous Western actions in Bosnia were not, if
only because of the timing of the war, just weeks after the admission of
Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into the North Atlantic alliance.
The Russian policy elite appeared to understand at once (in the manner of
the US elite after the invasion of South Korea in June 1950) that NATO’s
war in Serbia had a much broader significance than the future of Kosovo:
this was to be case study No. 1 of the world after NATO expansion, in
which NATO states, led by the United States, determined, without reference
to the UN Security Council (where the Russians have a veto) or even to the
letter of NATO’s Charter (concerning the nature of NATO actions –
defensive; and the area of NATO operations – confined to existing NATO
states), when, where, and how force might be employed to affect political
behaviour, perhaps extending to the border regions of Russia itself.34
Given that NATO would give no undertaking as to when the alliance
might cease admitting new members or who might be ineligible (such as the
Baltic states or Ukraine), NATO’s decision in favour of war exposed the
legal fiction of the Russia–NATO treaty: Russia’s relationship with NATO
was of symbolic, not substantive, significance. NATO’s war thus
emphasized in undeniable ways the weakness of Russian power and the
extent to which Russia’s influence depends upon fissures in its external
political environment. This was clearly too much for many Russian
politicians to bear.
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RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLICY IN THE 1990s 175

Yet in the final analysis, the pattern that we have described in this
study – in which Russia seeks to balance its great power pretensions while
preserving its lines to the West – prevailed. From the very outset of the
war, Russian officials distinguished their attitude toward NATO’s war and
NATO itself from their interests with respect to the states constituting
NATO. While Russia withdrew from the Russia–NATO Council, it
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remained part of the Contact Group, continued contacts with the G-7, and
stressed its continuing bilateral interest in good relations with NATO
states, including the United States. Russian histrionics notwithstanding,
and despite symbolic gestures such as sending an intelligence ship into the
Adriatic Sea, the Russian government made it clear that it would not be
drawn militarily into the NATO war against Serbia.
After weeks of attempted mediation between Miloševic and NATO,
Russia, faced with the choice of Miloševic or NATO (or simple
withdrawal from the fray), accepted the role of postman for the North
Atlantic alliance, with the Russian special envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin in
effect helping to deliver NATO’s terms to Miloševic in early June 1999.35
Russian domestic observers were not deceived: most, and most
importantly the Russian military leadership, saw Chernomyrdin’s role for
what it was – an attempt to disguise Russia’s isolation and impotence (and
abandonment of Miloševic) by being present at the armistice.36 Once
again, when pressed to make a choice, the Russian government chose to
tend its bridges to the West rather than make its Western policy hostage to
the particulars of disagreements over the Balkans. At the same time,
something changed with NATO’s war against Serbia. The fact of the war
and the way in which it was presented in Russia has had the effect of
crystallizing a progressively stronger scepticism towards the West that had
been building up in Russian society.
Through its efforts to shape the specific contours of the Russian political
economy, the United States had already, before the war, helped to make it
‘virtually impossible to conceive of a pro-reform Russian nationalist’.37 The
domestic backlash in Russia against what are seen as US-inspired ‘reform’
programmes, which has made untenable an explicitly pro-American
platform in Russian politics (in contrast with the early 1990s), has been
compounded by Russia’s increasing international isolation. The Russian
decision to send 200 troops hurriedly to Priština airport in Kosovo in June
1999 – made by the General Staff leadership without the involvement of
either the defence or the foreign minister38 – reflects a general Russian
sentiment that Russia still counts for something in world affairs.39
Russia is very different from the rest of Eastern Europe in this respect.
As the Romanian political scientist Silviu Brucan has observed, ‘while the
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176 RUSSIA AFTER COMMUNISM

mechanisms of the world economic system [compel] the [smaller] East

European nations to play by the rules of the world market, the referee being
the IMF, the dynamics of power politics generates in a great power like
Russia the will to resist, and gradually oppose, the tendency of the Western
powers to assert their supremacy’.40 If, according to this feeling, Russia is
not included by the West, Russia can still create facts on the ground to
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compel Western attention. The general shift in Russian politics away from
pro-Western positions that is part of Russia’s experience with Western-
aided economic ‘reform’ has rendered such interventions uncontroversial
among the Russian elite. The burden of proof in Russian politics is now
squarely on those arguing that the West, including the United States, should
be given the benefit of the doubt. The Russian–Western, and especially the
Russian–American, relationship has thus lost almost all of the sentimental
glue that bound the two countries together in a common anti-communist,
pro-reform consensus in the early 1990s.
This is not to say that Russia, in the aftermath of NATO’s war in
Serbia, is committed to a confrontation with the West. Far from it: this is
neither within Russia’s power nor within the imagination of the pragmatic
nationalist consensus that prevails in Moscow. As Paul Kubicek has noted,
‘The mainstream Russian foreign policy of the pragmatic nationalists
envisions a realistic partnership with the West and is not overtly anti-
Western’.41 Thus, after the melodramatic dash of the Russian paratroopers
to Priština – many more Russian troops were blocked by aggressive US
diplomacy to close East European airspace to Russian transport aircraft42
– Russian peacekeepers assumed the roles that NATO had assigned to
them, without their own sector, and reporting to a NATO commander.
Rather, the cost of NATO’s war will be calculated in terms of the greater
difficulty of obtaining Russian co-operation in areas – such as the
collaborative managing of Russia’s nuclear archipelago, civilian as well as
military – that are as much in the Western as in the Russian interest but
which have been and may continue to be held political hostage in the
Russian Duma (as in the case of the START II treaty).

Conclusions
This is not to say that a collapse in Russian–Western relations is
inevitable. For the first prolonged period since the late nineteenth century,
there is no ideological animus driving the Russian–American relationship.
Moreover, key groups in the Russian economic elite, especially in the
energy and metals sectors – which together account for 56 per cent of
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RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLICY IN THE 1990s 177

Russian exports – require reliable access to Western markets and thus
reasonably harmonious relations with the leading industrial democracies.
Related to that, the Russian state is deeply indebted to the Western
financial community, private and public: Russia’s total external debt,
forecast at $157 billion by the end of 1999, is equivalent to about 93 per
cent of Russia’s post-devaluation GDP.43
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Any hope for continued debt rescheduling, not to mention writing off
Soviet era debt, which is about 70 per cent of the total, also requires good
relations with the United States and the leading creditor states, which are
all close US allies. Finally, Russia’s government under President Yeltsin,
proceeding from these facts and the more general assumption that few if
any of Russia’s national interests or even those of its key elites could be
served in the face of the active hostility of the United States and its allies,
sought to preserve lines of communication with the West even while
tacking to the increasingly nationalist wind of Russian domestic politics.
For all the public airing of differences between Russia and the United
States over NATO expansion and the Balkans, Russia remains committed
to the joint Russia–NATO Council established in the wake of NATO
expansion and has been an active member of the six-nation Contact Group
devoted to diplomatic coordination on Balkan issues. In the absence of
territorial disputes, ideological conflict, intense economic friction, or
irreconcilable geopolitical interests, there is no reason to expect that
intelligent diplomacy – that is, the management of international relations
by negotiation – should not be able to maintain a normal Russian–Western
relationship.
To be sure, even in the event of a serious collapse in the relationship,
there is little prospect of a return to anything like the cold war. Russian
power has already disintegrated too far for such a scenario to materialize.
Russia can no longer project its power to regions of vital interest to the
G-7 world; where Russian power still matters, as throughout the former
USSR, G-7 interests are of comparatively little importance.
The danger of a fraying of Russian–Western relations lies not in the
re-creation of the global cold-war antagonism or a resurgence of Russian
imperialism but rather in the greater difficulty and higher costs of
obtaining Russian co-operation in areas where such co-operation is
essential to maintaining international security. For example, for eight
years since mid-1992, the Russian parliament had refused to ratify the
START II nuclear disarmament treaty signed by Presidents Yeltsin and
Bush, thereby barring the way to further collaborative disarmament. It did
so not because of convincing substantive objections to the treaty (Russia
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178 RUSSIA AFTER COMMUNISM

is disarming in any case because of the dilapidation of its nuclear

infrastructure) but rather as a political protest against what the nationalist-
minded Russian parliament deems as undue deference by the government
to the United States and as a way of protesting at developments over
which Russia has little control, such as NATO expansion, uncertainty over
US intentions regarding the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty restricting
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each country’s ability to shoot down the other’s missiles, and the NATO
war against Serbia.
There are several critical areas where Russian–G-7 co-operation is
a necessary prerequisite to satisfying vital US national interests.
Transforming Russia into a democracy is not one of them. They include:

(i) managing the nuclear legacy of the cold war, both military and
civilian stockpiles, in a world where one nuclear power – Russia
itself – may no longer be assumed to be a stable state;
(ii) containing the proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons
of mass destruction in a context where Russian commercial interests
conflict with Russia’s obligations under the Nuclear Non-
Proliferation Treaty and other international agreements;
(iii) ensuring that the vast stretches of south central Eurasia that were
formerly part of the USSR do not become a haven or conduit for
global terrorism;
(iv) working to ensure that the vast untapped energy resources of the
Caspian Sea basin become available to international consumers
through transport and distribution networks that correspond to
producer and consumer interests; and finally
(v) establishing sufficient stability along Russia’s transcontinental
southern borderlands to minimize the international fallout from the
inevitable regionalization of the Russian Federation: the
consequences of Russia’s disintegration for global stability – as with
Chinese or Indian – are too awful to contemplate.

Finally, as we have seen, there was a decided shift in Russian policy

beginning in mid-1993 away from the premises of liberal internationalism
towards a more realist, and probably more realistic, assessment of Russian
interests and capabilities. Liberal Russia discovered very early, as had
both the Provisional Government of 1917 and the Bolsheviks by 1921,
that the structure of the international political system tends to undermine
the transformative claims of ideology. A Russia that would not (or could
not) be integrated into a wealthier, more powerful international
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RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLICY IN THE 1990s 179

community was a Russia that would (as in the 1920s) be forced to rely
mainly on its own resources, such as they were, in crafting its external
policies and relationships. As it turned out, Russia has to date managed to
avoid the twin traps of outright defiance and abject dependency: a state
with far fewer power resources than it desired nevertheless managed to
assert its interests in primacy within the ex-Soviet region, diplomatic
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peerage (within limits) with NATO in the Balkans, rejection (in the end
unsuccessfully) of NATO expansion, and defiance of US policy in Iran
and Iraq, without in the process undermining its multiple ties with the
immensely more powerful G-7 world, on which Russian finances were in
fact critically dependent.
Russia has been able to maintain this balancing act in spite of a
precarious decline in the traditional resources of power in part because,
although Russia’s material resources have indeed declined, the nature of
the Western stake in international order has also been transformed in the
wake of the end of the cold war. Thus, the scope of real Western influence
is much more restricted than might be deduced from a projection of the
indices of the superiority of Western power, just as the scope of Russian
influence is often greater than one might deduce from a simple projection
of the indices of the inferiority of Russian power. Consequently, Russian
influence has proved greatest where the Western stake is least intense and
weakest where it is at its most intense.
Where most successful, Russia has nevertheless not been able to
exclude the West from projecting its power (for example, Western
assertion of energy interests in the Caucasus and Central Asia); where
least successful, Russia has nevertheless managed to elicit from the
West commitments to institutionalized consultation. These commitments,
in turn, have provided significant external incentives for Russian policy
to remain broadly within a framework of diplomatic engagement with
states whose specific interests did not always coincide with those of
the Russian government. It would thus appear to be a primary challenge
of both Russian and Western diplomacy to maintain a structure of
relations between Russia and the West that will preserve and if possible
enhance incentives for collaboration rather than defection from attempts
to manage international relations by negotiation rather than by unilateral
initiative.
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180 RUSSIA AFTER COMMUNISM

NOTES

1. Andrei Kozyrev, ‘Russia and Human Rights’, Slavic Review, Vol.51, No.2 (Summer 1992),
pp.287–93.
2. Sergei Markov, ‘NATO: The Two Faces of Moscow’, Moscow Times, 28 June 1995, as
reprinted in The World Press Review, Vol.42, No.10 (Oct. 1995), p.17.
3. James R. Millar, ‘The De-development of Russia’, Current History, Oct. 1999, p.323.
4. Kozyrev, ‘Russia and Human Rights’; see also his liberal–internationalist speech before the
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United Nations General Assembly in September 1992, ‘Vystuplenie ministra inostrannykh

del Rossiiskoi Federatsii A.V. Kozyreva na 47-i sessii General’noi Assamblei OON’,
Diplomaticheskii Vestnik, 1992, No.19–20, pp.18–20.
5. For a documented analysis, see David Kerr, ‘The New Eurasianaism: The Rise of Geopolitics
in Russia’s Foreign Policy’, Europe–Asia Studies, Vol.47, No.6 (Sept. 1995), pp.977–88; for
a discussion of extremist Russian views, see Aleksandr Yanov, Posle Yel’tsina (Moscow:
KRUK, 1995), pp.26–111; for one such work see Aleksandr Dugin, Osnovy Geopolitiki.
Geopoliticheskoe budushchee Rossii (Moscow: Arktogeya, 1997).
6. The case under discussion concerned union with Belarus, which Russian liberals such as
Anatolii Chubais opposed because of the economic costs and the feared drag on Russia’s
liberal prospects in general: see Sherman W. Garnett, ‘Europe’s Crossroads: Russia and the
West in the New Borderlands’, in Michael Mandelbaum (ed.), The New Russian Foreign
Policy (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1998), p.75.
7. For excerpts of Kozyrev’s shocking speech, in which he affected the stance of a Zhirinovskii-
like rabid nationalist, see The New York Times, 15 Dec. 1992, p.A16. One indication of the
domestic political damage that Kozyrev inflicted on himself with the speech, akin to
Khrushchev’s banging the shoe at the General Assembly in 1960, is seen in the fact that the
foreign ministry did not include this speech in its official documentary collection on Russian
foreign policy between 1990 and 1992; his previous speeches at CSCE meetings were
published: see Ministerstvo inostrannykh del Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Vneshnyaya politika
Rossii. Sbornik dokumentov 1990–1992 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, 1996). For
earlier CSCE speeches by Kozyrev, see pp.197–9, 326–8.
8. For analysis and a wealth of primary sources, see Rajan Menon, ‘After Empire: Russia and
the Southern “Near Abroad”’, in Mandelbaum (ed.), The New Russian Foreign Policy,
pp.100–66; see also Jean Radvanyi, ‘Transports et géostratégie au sud de la Russie’, Le
Monde Diplomatique, June 1998, pp.18–19.
9. Allen Lynch, ‘Der Einfluss des Militaers auf die Aussenpolitik Russlands’, Europa Archiv,
Vol.49, No.15 (10 Aug. 1994), pp.437–46.
10. For a detailed analysis of this general point as applied to the Russian–Chechen war, see Gail
W. Lapidus, ‘Contested Sovereignty: The Tragedy of Chechnya’, International Security,
Vol.23, No.1 (Summer 1998), esp. pp.7–8, 28–41.
11. The English-language text of the Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Co-operation and
Security between NATO and the Russian Federation may be found at <www.nato.int/
docu.basictxt/fndact-a.htm>.
12. Andrei Kozyrev, ‘The New Russia and the Atlantic Alliance’, NATO Review, Feb. 1993,
pp.3–6; Suzanne Crow, ‘Russia Asserts its Strategic Agenda’, RFE-RL Research Report,
Vol.2, No.50 (17 Dec. 1993), pp.1–8.
13. L.N. Shanshieva, ‘Vvedenie’, in Postkommunisticheskaya vostochnaya Yevropa: novye
mezhgosudarstvennye i vneshnepoliticheskie orientiry (Moscow: Institut nauchnoi
informatsii po obshchestvennym naukam, 1996), p.7; P. Kandel’, ‘O vrede “derzhavnosti”
dlya interesov derzhavy’, Moskovskie novosti, 28 Aug. 1993, p.7a.
14. Margot Light, ‘The USSR/CIS and Democratisation in Eastern Europe’, in Geoffrey
Pridham, Eric Herring and George Sanford (eds.), Building Democracy? The International
Dimension of Democratisation in Eastern Europe (London: Leicester University Press,
1997), pp.134–5.
15. Light, ‘The USSR/CIS and Democratisation’, p.146.
16. Ibid., p.149.
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RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLICY IN THE 1990s 181

17. Susanne M. Birgerson and Roger E. Kanet, ‘East–Central Europe and the Russian
Federation’, Problems of Post-Communism, Vol.42, No.4 (July/Aug. 1995), p.36.
18. Light, ‘The USSR/CIS and Democratisation’, pp.148–9.
19. O. Ivanov and V. Pozdnyakov, ‘Russia and the European Union’, International Affairs
(Moscow), 1998, No.3, p.55. On 27 October 1998, the Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov
ruled out Russian membership of the European Union; as reported in Izvestiya, 28 Oct. 1998,
Ivanov stated that if Russian were to join such institutions as NATO and the EU, they ‘would
cease being what they are’.
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20. B. Pichugin, ‘Russia and the European Union’s Eastward Expansion’, International Affairs
(Moscow), 1996, No.1, at <http://home.mosinfo.ru/news/int-aff/demo/data/1-10.htm>, p.3;
for the Russian original, see Mezhdunarodnaya zhizn’, 1996, No.2, pp.31–6.
21. Ibid., p.49.
22. Ibid., p.50.
23. Ibid.
24. John Berryman, ‘EU/NATO Enlargement: Russian Perspectives and Responses’, paper
delivered to the Annual Conference of the International Security Studies Section of the ISA,
Norfolk, VA, 24–5 Oct. 1997, p.5.
25. Birgerson and Kanet, ‘East–Central Europe and the Russian Federation’, p.31.
26. Michael Wyzan, ‘Economic Liaisons: The Baltics Look Toward the European Union’,
Transitions (Prague), Vol.5, No.12 (Dec. 1998), p.55.
27. Pichugin, ‘Russia and the European Union’s Eastward Expansion’, p.4.
28. Sherman W. Garnett, ‘Russia and the West in the New Borderlands’, in Mandelbaum (ed.),
The New Russian Foreign Policy, pp.98–9.
29. ITAR-TASS, 27 Feb. 1997, cited in Garnett, ‘Russia and the West’, p.98.
30. Yuri P. Davydov, ‘Rossiya i NATO. “Posle Bala”’, SShA, 1998, No.1, pp.3–18, and Jeremy
Bransten, ‘Russia: Ivanov Says Ties with NATO Have Improved Significantly’, RFE/RL
(Prague), 9 Dec. 1998, at <www.rferl.org/nca/features/1998/12/F.RU.981209182649.html>.
31. Diplomaticheskii vestnik, 1999, Nos.4 (April), 5 (May) and 6 (June), passim.
32. Ibid., 1999, No.4, p.10.
33. For a detailed sampling of Russian official and popular views on the war, see the translated
items in Gordon Livermoore (ed.), Russian Foreign Policy: 1994–1998 (Columbus, OH:
Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press, 1999), pp.116–42. This is a special supplement
covering the period March–July 1999.
34. ‘Balkanskii krizis i rossiisko-amerikanskie otnosheniya’, SShA, 1999, No.10, pp.41, 50–51;
Ted Hopf, ‘How NATO’s War in Yugoslavia is Making Foreign Policy in Moscow’, Policy
Memo Series, #81 (Cambridge, MA: Program on New Approaches to Russian Security, Oct.
1999); B. Kazantsev, ‘Serious Concern Over New NATO Strategy’, International Affairs
(Moscow), Vol.45, No.2 (1999), pp.23–8. Kazantsev is deputy director of the Department of
European Co-operation in the Russian ministry of foreign affairs; see also Stanislav
Chernyavskii, ‘Zakavkaz’e v planakh Vashingtona’, Svobodnaya mysl’, 1999, No.7,
pp.56–61.
35. Andre Fontaine, ‘1979–1999: De Kaboul au Kosovo’, Politique Etrangère, 1999, No.3,
p.502. For the Russian texts of the peace agreement and the enabling UN Security Council
Resolution (#1244), see Diplomaticheskii vestnik, 1999, No.7 (July), pp.6–12.
36. Livermoore, Russian Foreign Policy, pp.136–7.
37. Janine Wedel, Collision and Collusion (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), p.138.
38. According to an interview by the reputable Giulietto Chiesa with a ‘high-ranking officer in
the Russian Armed Forces’, as published in La Stampa (Turin), 13 June 1999, as translated
in Johnson’s List (No.3342, Item 7, 15 June 1999).
39. For one Russian general’s view on this, see ‘Balkanskii krizis i rossiisko-amerikanskie
otnosheniya’, p.47.
40. Silviu Brucan, Social Change in Russia and Eastern Europe: From Party Hacks to Nouveaux
Riches (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), p.102.
41. Paul Kubicek, ‘Russian Foreign Policy and the West’, Political Science Quarterly, Vol.114,
No.1 (Winter 1999–2000), pp.550–54 and 568; also Neil Malcolm, Alex Pravda, Roy Allison
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182 RUSSIA AFTER COMMUNISM

and Margot Light (eds.), International Factors in Russian Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996), pp.87–88.
42. Robert G. Kaiser and David Hoffman, ‘Russia Had Bigger Plan in Kosovo’, The Washington
Post, 25 June 1999, p.A1.
43. Martin Wolf, ‘Price of Forgiveness’, The Financial Times, 11 Aug. 1999, p.10. For 2000, all
Russian foreign debt was expected to equal approximately 100 per cent of dollarized GDP
($180 billion): see Economist Intelligence Unit, Country Forecast: Russia (July 2000); also
available at <http://www.eiu.com>.
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