The Finlandization of Russia? The Kremlin’s Geopolitical and Geo-economic Choices

Since the late 1990s, relations between Russia and the West have gradually but steadily deteriorated. Disagreements over the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, conflicting interests in the post- Soviet space, as well as the recent clashes over the war in Chechnya, have demonstrated that the hopes for harmonious and parallel Russo-Western interests expressed a decade ago have not been realized. Moreover, Moscow increasingly perceives that Russian foreign policy has had to surrender on almost all points of disagreement with the West. The chain of geopolitical defeats in the 1990s, as they are perceived in Moscow, marked the failure of two major foreign policy strategies that Russia desperately attempted to pursue at the end of the 20th century. […]

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