Foreign relations of Russia
The foreign relations of the Russian Federation is the policy arm of the government of Russia which guides its interactions with other nations, their citizens, and foreign organizations. This article covers the foreign policy of the Russian Federation since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in late 1991. At present, Russia has no diplomatic relations with Ukraine due to the Russo-Ukrainian war. Other than Ukraine, Russia also has no diplomatic relations with Georgia, Bhutan, the Federated States of Micronesia or Solomon Islands.
Kremlin's foreign policy debates show a conflict among three rival schools: Atlanticists, seeking a closer relationship with the United States and the Western World in general; Imperialists, seeking a recovery of the semi-hegemonic status lost during the previous decade; and Neo-Slavophiles, promoting the isolation of Russia within its own cultural sphere. While Atlanticism was the dominant ideology during the first years of the new Russian Federation, under Andrei Kozyrev, it came under attack for its failure to defend Russian pre-eminence in the former USSR. The promotion of Yevgeny Primakov to Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1996 marked the beginning of a more nationalistic approach to foreign policy.
Another major trend has been Eurasianism, a school of thought that emerged during the early 20th century. Eurasianists assert that Russia is composed of Slavic, Turkic and Asiatic cultures and equates Liberalism with Eurocentric imperialism. One of the earliest ideologues of Eurasianism was the Russian historian Nikolai Trubetzkoy, who denounced the Europhilic Czar Peter I and advocated Russian embrace of the Asiatic "legacy of Chinggis Khan" to establish a trans-continental Eurasian state. Following the collapse of Soviet Union, Eurasianism gained public ascendency through the writings of philosopher Aleksandr Dugin and has become the official ideological policy under the government of Vladimir Putin.
Vladimir Putin held the presidency from January 2000 to May 2008, and again from May 2012 to the present. Under Putin, Russia has engaged in several notable conflicts, including against the neighboring country of Ukraine. He recognized the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk within that country. Relations with the United States in particular have sharply deteriorated between 2001 and 2022, with the Kremlin blaming U.S. involvement in the Middle East and countries bordering Russia. Relations with the European Union became hostile after Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.
On February 24, 2022, Russia started the Russo-Ukrainian war, prompting the imposition of substantial economic and political sanctions by the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Japan, and other countries. The Russian government now has a specified "Unfriendly Countries List" which indicates those countries with which relations are now strained. Despite deteriorating relations with the Western world since the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war, Russia still maintains support and strong relations with some countries, such as China, India, Belarus, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, North Korea, Myanmar, Eritrea, Mali, Central African Republic, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Iraq, Libya, Palestine, and Niger. Russia also has strong support from the Houthis in Yemen.
Russia also maintains positive relations with countries that have been described as "Russia-leaning" according to The Economist. These countries include Algeria, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Uganda. Russia also maintains positive relations with countries considered neutral on the world stage such as Brazil, Honduras, Bangladesh, India, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. With countries traditionally considered Western aligned, Russia maintains positive relations with Hungary, Serbia, Slovakia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Armenia and the United Arab Emirates.
History
Foreign policy of the Russian Empire
Foreign relations of the Soviet Union
Foreign policy of the Russian Federation
In international affairs, Putin had made increasingly critical public statements regarding the foreign policy of the United States and other Western countries. In February 2007, at the annual Munich Conference on Security Policy, he criticized what he called the U.S. monopolistic dominance in global relations and claimed that the U.S. displayed an "almost unconstrained hyper use of force in international relations." He said the result of it is that "no one feels safe! Because no one can feel that international law is like a stone wall that will protect them. Of course such a policy stimulates an arms race."File:Putin in Switzerland 2021 10.jpg|thumb|upright=1.2|Vladimir Putin meeting with American president Joe Biden, 2021.File:Vladimir Putin and Benyamin Netanyahu 01.jpg|thumb|180px|Meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 2016.
Putin proposed initiatives such as establishing international centers for the enrichment of uranium and prevention of deploying weapons in outer space. In a January 2007 interview, Putin stated that Russia is in favor of a democratic multipolar world and of strengthening the system of international law.
2000-2006
Putin is often characterized as an autocrat by the Western media and politicians. His relationship with former U.S. President George W. Bush, former and current Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, former French President Jacques Chirac, and former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi are reported to be personally friendly. Putin's relationship with Germany's former Chancellor, Angela Merkel, is reported to be "cooler" and "more business-like" than his partnership with Gerhard Schröder, who accepted a job with a Russian-led consortium after leaving office.During the Iraq disarmament crisis in 2002–2003, Putin opposed Washington's move to invade Iraq, without the benefit of a United Nations Security Council resolution explicitly authorizing the use of military force. After the official end of the war was announced, U.S. President George W. Bush asked the United Nations to lift sanctions on Iraq. Putin supported lifting of the sanctions in due course, arguing that the UN commission first be given a chance to complete its work on the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
During the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election, Putin twice visited Ukraine before the election to show his support for Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, who was widely seen as a pro-Kremlin candidate, and he congratulated him on his anticipated victory before official election results had even been released. Putin's personal support for Yanukovych was criticized as unwarranted interference in the affairs of a sovereign state. Crises also developed in Russia's relations with Georgia and Moldova, both former Soviet republics accusing Moscow of supporting separatist entities in their territories
In 2005, Putin and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder negotiated the construction of a major gas pipeline over the Baltic exclusively between Russia and Germany. Schröder also attended Putin's 53rd birthday celebration in Saint Petersburg the same year.
The end of 2006 brought strained relations between Russia and Britain, in the wake of the death of a former FSB officer in London by poisoning. On July 20, 2007, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown expelled "four Russian envoys over Putin's refusal to extradite ex-KGB agent Andrei Lugovoi, wanted in the UK for the murder of fellow former spy Alexander Litvinenko in London." The Russian constitution prohibits the extradition of Russian nationals to third countries. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said that "this situation is not unique, and other countries have amended their constitutions, for example, to give effect to the European Arrest Warrant."
When Litvinenko was dying from radiation poisoning, he accused Putin of directing the assassination, in a statement which was released shortly after his death by his friend Alex Goldfarb. Critics have doubted that Litvinenko is the true author of the released statement. When asked about the Litvinenko accusations, Putin said that a statement released posthumously of its author "naturally deserves no comment."
The expulsions were seen as "the biggest rift since the countries expelled each other's diplomats in 1996 after a spying dispute." In response to the situation, Putin stated, "I think we will overcome this mini-crisis. Russian-British relations will develop normally. On both the Russian side and the British side, we are interested in the development of those relations." Despite this, British Ambassador Tony Brenton was told by the Russian Foreign Ministry that UK diplomats would be given 10 days before they were expelled in response. The Russian government also announced that it would suspend issuing visas to UK officials, and froze cooperation on counterterrorism, in response to Britain suspending contacts with their Federal Security Service.
Alexander Shokhin, president of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, warned that British investors in Russia will "face greater scrutiny from tax and regulatory authorities. They could also lose out in government tenders." Some see the crisis as originating with Britain's decision to grant Putin's former patron, Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky, political asylum in 2003. Earlier in 2007, Berezovsky had called for the overthrow of Putin.
2007-2009
Putin took an active personal part in promoting the Act of Canonical Communion with the Moscow Patriarchate signed in May 2007, which restored relations between the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church and Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia after the 80-year schism.The Commonwealth of Independent States, seen in Moscow as its traditional sphere of influence, became one of Putin's foreign policy priorities, as the EU and NATO have grown to encompass much of Central Europe and, more recently, the Baltic states.
On April 26, 2007, in his annual address to the Federal Assembly, Putin announced plans to declare a moratorium on the observance of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe by Russia until all NATO members ratified it and started observing its provisions, as Russia had been doing on a unilateral basis. Putin argues that as new NATO members have not even signed the treaty so far, an imbalance in the presence of NATO and Russian armed forces in Europe creates a real threat and an unpredictable situation for Russia. NATO members said they would refuse to ratify the treaty until Russia complied with its 1999 commitments made in Istanbul, whereby Russia should remove troops and military equipment from Moldova and Georgia. Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, was quoted as saying in response that "Russia has long since fulfilled all its Istanbul obligations relevant to CFE."
On December 11, 2007, Russia suspended its participation in the CFE. On December 12, 2007, the United States officially stated that it "deeply regretted the Russian Federation's decision to 'suspend' implementation of its obligations under the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe." State Department spokesman Sean McCormack added in a written statement that "Russia's conventional forces are the largest on the European continent, and its unilateral action damages this successful arms control regime." NATO's primary concern arising from Russia's suspension is that Moscow could now accelerate its military presence in the Northern Caucasus.
The months following Putin's Munich speech were marked by tension and a surge in rhetoric on both sides of the Atlantic. As a result, Vladimir Putin stated at the anniversary of the Victory Day, "these threats are not becoming fewer, but are only transforming and changing their appearance. These new threats, just as under the Third Reich, show the same contempt for human life, and the same aspiration to establish an exclusive dictate over the world." This was interpreted by some Russian and Western commentators as comparing the United States to Nazi Germany.
In 2007, on the eve of the 33rd Summit of the G8 in Heiligendamm, Germany, U.S. journalist Anne Applebaum, who is married to a Polish politician, wrote that "Whether by waging cyberwarfare on Estonia, threatening the gas supplies of Lithuania, or boycotting Georgian wine and Polish meat, has, over the past few years, made it clear that he intends to reassert Russian influence in the former communist states of Europe, whether those states want Russian influence or not. At the same time, he has also made it clear that he no longer sees Western nations as mere benign trading partners, but rather as Cold War-style threats."
In his article "No wonder they like Putin," British academic Norman Stone compared Putin to General Charles de Gaulle. Adi Ignatius argues that "Putin... is not a Stalin. There are no mass purges in Russia today, no broad climate of terror. But Putin is reconstituting a strong state, and anyone who stands in his way will pay for it." Both Russian and U.S. officials consistently denied the idea of a new Cold War. At the Munich Conference, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said, "We all face many common problems and challenges that must be addressed in partnership with other countries, including Russia.... one Cold War was quite enough." In June 2007, just prior to the 33rd G8 Summit, Vladimir Putin said, "We do not want confrontation; we want to engage in dialogue. However, we want a dialogue that acknowledges the equality of both parties' interests."
On June 7, 2007, Putin, publicly opposed to a U.S. missile shield in Europe, presented President George W. Bush with a counterproposal of sharing the use of the Soviet-era radar system in Azerbaijan, rather than building a new system in Poland and the Czech Republic. Putin expressed readiness to modernize the Gabala radar station, which has been in operation since 1986. Putin proposed it would not be necessary to place interceptor missiles in Poland then, but interceptors could be placed in NATO member Turkey or Iraq. Putin suggested equal involvement of interested European countries in the project.
In June 2007, in an interview with journalists of G8 countries, when answering the question of whether Russian nuclear forces may be focused on European targets in case "the United States continues building a strategic shield in Poland and the Czech Republic," Putin admitted that "if part of the United States' nuclear capability is situated in Europe and that our military experts consider that they represent a potential threat then we will have to take appropriate retaliatory steps. What steps? Of course we must have new targets in Europe."
File:CSTO_and_SCO.png|thumb|SCO and CSTO members
Following the 2007 Peace Mission military exercises jointly conducted by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation member states, Putin announced in August 2007 that the resumption on a permanent basis of long-distance patrol flights of Russia's strategic bombers that were suspended in 1992. The announcement made during the SCO summit in the light of joint Russian-Chinese military exercises, first-ever in history to be held on Russian territory, makes some believe that Putin is inclined to set up an anti-NATO bloc, or the Asian version of OPEC.
When presented with the suggestion that "Western observers are already likening the SCO to a military organisation that would stand in opposition to NATO," Putin answered that "this kind of comparison is inappropriate in both form and substance." Russian Chief of the General Staff Yury Baluyevsky was quoted as saying that "there should be no talk of creating a military or political alliance or union of any kind, because this would contradict the founding principles of SCO."
The resumption of long-distance flights of the Russian Air Force's strategic bombers was followed by the announcement by Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov during his meeting with Putin on December 5, 2007, that 11 ships, including the aircraft carrier Kuznetsov, would take part in the first major navy sortie into the Mediterranean since Soviet times. The sortie was to be backed up by 47 aircraft, including strategic bombers. According to Serdyukov, this is an effort to resume regular Russian naval patrols on the world's oceans, the view that is also supported by Russian media. The military analyst from Novaya Gazeta Pavel Felgenhauer believes that the accident-prone Kuznetsov is scarcely seaworthy, and is more of a menace to her crew than any putative enemy.
In September 2007, Putin visited Indonesia, and in doing so, became the first Russian leader to visit the country in more than 50 years. In the same month, Putin also attended the APEC meeting held in Sydney, Australia, where he met with Australian Prime Minister John Howard, and signed a uranium trade deal. This was the first visit of a Russian president to Australia.
In October 2007, Putin visited Tehran, Iran to participate in the Second Caspian Summit, where he met with Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Other participants were leaders of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan. This is the first visit of a leader from the Kremlin to Iran, since Joseph Stalin's participation in the Tehran Conference in 1943. At a press conference after the summit, Putin stated that "all our states have the right to develop their peaceful nuclear programmes without any restrictions." During the summit, it was also agreed that its participants, under no circumstances, would let any third-party state use their territory as a base for aggression or military action against any other participant.
On October 26, 2007, at a press conference following the 20th Russia-EU Summit in Portugal, Putin proposed to create a Russian-European Institute for Freedom and Democracy, headquartered either in Brussels, or in one of the European capitals, and added that "we are ready to supply funds for financing it, just as Europe covers the costs of projects in Russia." This newly proposed institution is expected to monitor human rights violations in Europe and contribute to the development of European democracy.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President George W. Bush failed to resolve their differences over U.S. plans for a missile defense system based in Poland and the Czech Republic, in their meeting in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi in April 2008. Putin made clear that he did not agree with the decision to establish sites in the Eastern European countries. However, he said that the two had agreed to a "strategic framework" to guide future U.S.-Russian relations, in which the two countries recognized that the era in which each had considered the other to be a "strategic threat or enemy" was over.
Putin expressed cautious optimism that the two sides could find a way to cooperate over missile defense and described his eight-year relationship with President Bush as "mostly positive." The Sochi summit was the Bush's last meeting with Putin as a sitting president, following both leaders' attendance at the NATO summit in Romania earlier that month. That summit also highlighted differences between Washington and Moscow, over U.S.-backed proposals to extend the military alliance to include the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia. Russia opposes the proposed expansion, fearing it will reduce its own influence over its neighbours.
Fareed Zakaria suggested that the 2008 South Ossetia War turned out to be a diplomatic disaster for Russia. He added that it was a major strategic blunder, turning neighboring nations such as Ukraine to embrace the United States and other Western nations more. Hungarian-American geostrategist George Friedman countered that both the war and Russian foreign policy have been successful in expanding Russia's influence.