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| Heart-to-Heart: Presidents Bush and Putin (at last month's G-8 summit) began a 24-hour visit at the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport,
Maine, Sunday. Jim Young/Reuters/File |
Why Russia resents US tack
As Bush hosts Putin to repair fraying ties, a mood of misgiving rooted in the 1990s looms over the summit.
from the July 2, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 4
Though Mr. Yeltsin grumbled constantly, Moscow ultimately accepted the expansion of NATO to ex-Soviet allies in Eastern Europe and even cooperated with US-led efforts to impose order in the former Yugoslavia.
"Russia didn't seem to present any problems to the West because its weakness made it compliant," says Mr. Klimov. "So, they decided we didn't matter and got used to doing things without considering our needs or wishes."
He adds that it's particularly galling today to hear Americans suggest that issues like European missile defense are none of Russia's business.
"We all know how Americans would react if Russia were to place strategic components in Cuba," Klimov says.
Russia may have grudgingly assented to the enlargement of NATO, which took in virtually all the USSR's former Eastern European allies and the three ex-Soviet Baltic states between 1998 and 2004, but has never fully accepted it, experts say.
"In the early '90s, Russia would have gladly join a new security system in Europe, but we were rejected, and NATO was expanded instead," says Sergei Karaganov, chair of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policies, an influential Moscow think tank. "NATO was created to oppose the Soviet Union, and its main effect is still to isolate Russia."
For Russians, the '90s were a disastrous decade in which the economy imploded, crime flourished, and the shady privatization of state assets led to the rise of super-rich, politically connected oligarchs who did little to improve conditions for the majority.
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