Russia–United States relations
The United States and Russia maintain strategic foreign relations. They have had diplomatic relations since the establishment of the latter country in 1991, a continuation of the relationship the United States has had with various Russian governments since 1803. While both nations have shared interests in nuclear safety and security, nonproliferation, counterterrorism, and space exploration, their relationship has been shown through a mixture of cooperation, competition, and hostility, with both countries considering one another foreign adversaries for much of their relationship. Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, the US has pursued normalization and the bettering of relations, largely centered around the resolution of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of the Cold War, the relationship was generally warm under Russian president Boris Yeltsin. In the early years of Yeltsin's presidency, the United States and Russia established a cooperative relationship and worked closely together to address global issues such as arms control, counterterrorism, and the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina. During Yeltsin's second term, United States–Russia relations became more strained. The NATO intervention in Yugoslavia, in particular, the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo, was strongly opposed by Yeltsin. Although the Soviet Union had been strongly opposed by the Titovian flavour of independence, Yeltsin saw it as an infringement on Russia's latter-day sphere of influence. Yeltsin also criticized NATO's expansion into Eastern Europe, which he saw as a threat to Russia's security.
After Vladimir Putin became President of Russia in 2000, he initially sought to improve relations with the United States. The two countries cooperated on issues such as counterterrorism and arms control. Putin worked closely with United States president George W. Bush on the war in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks. Following Putin's re-election to the Russian presidency in 2012, relations between the two countries were significantly strained due to Russia's annexation of Crimea and the Russian military intervention in Ukraine. Deterioration continued with the Russian military intervention in the Syrian civil war.
Relations further deteriorated during the presidency of Joe Biden following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. International sanctions imposed since 2014 were significantly expanded by the U.S. and its allies, including several state-owned banks and oligarchs. During the second presidency of Donald Trump, the United States has moved to normalize relations with Russia and has sided with Russia in the United Nations, voting against a resolution to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2025, in a dramatic departure from the long-standing American position on humanitarian issues since 2014. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has also ordered the suspension of offensive cyber operations against Russia.
Background
United States and the Russian Empire
Official contacts between the Russian Empire and the new United States began in 1776. Russia, while formally neutral during the American Revolution, favored the U.S.There was little trade or migration before the late 19th century. Formal diplomatic ties were established in 1809. During the American Civil War, Russia supported the Union, largely because it believed that the U.S. served as a counterbalance to its geopolitical rival, the United Kingdom. In 1863, the Russian Navy's Baltic and Pacific fleets wintered in the American ports of New York and San Francisco, respectively.
Russia operated a small fur-trade operations in Alaska, coupled with missionaries to the natives. By 1861, the project had lost money, threatened to antagonize the Americans, and could not be defended from Britain. It proved practically impossible to entice Russians to permanently migrate to Alaska; only a few hundred were there in 1867. In the Alaska Purchase of 1867, the land was sold to the United States for $7.2 million.
The Russian administrators and military left Alaska, but some missionaries stayed on to minister to the many natives who converted to the Russian Orthodox faith.
After 1880, repeated anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia alienated American elite and public opinion. In 1903, the Kishinev pogrom killed 47 Jews, injured 400, and left 10,000 homeless and dependent on relief. American Jews began large-scale organized financial help and assisted in emigration.
The Treaty of Portsmouth, brokered by United States president Theodore Roosevelt, ended the Russo-Japanese War.
During World War I, the United States declaration of war on Germany came after Nicholas II had abdicated as a result of the February Revolution. When the tsar was still in power, many Americans deplored fighting a war with him as an ally. With him gone, the Wilson administration used the new provisional government to describe how the democratic nations were fighting against autocratic old empires of Germany and Austria-Hungary. During the war, the American Expeditionary Forces were just starting to see battle when the October Revolution happened in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government and removed Russia from the war.
Before the armistice in November 1918, the Americans had helped the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War with the Polar Bear Expedition and the American Expeditionary Force Siberia. The Americans' goal was not necessarily ideological but rather to prevent the German enemy from gaining access to war supplies controlled by the Bolsheviks, though the United States also tacitly supported the White movement against the Bolsheviks.
From 1820 until 1917, about 3.3 million immigrants arrived in the U.S. from the Russian Empire. Most were Jews, Poles, or Lithuanians; only 100,000 were ethnic Russians.
United States and the Soviet Union
By 1921, after the Bolsheviks gained the upper hand in the Russian Civil War, executed the Romanov imperial family, repudiated the tsarist debt, and called for a world revolution by the working class, it was regarded as a pariah nation by most of the world. Beyond the Russian Civil War, relations were also dogged by claims of American companies for compensation for the nationalized industries they had invested in. The U.S., while starting to develop trade and economic ties, was the last major world power that continued to refuse to formally recognize the Soviet government. The United States and Soviet Russia established diplomatic relations in November 1933.The United States and the Soviet Union, along with Britain, were the leaders of the Allies against the Axis powers during World War II. Following the onset of the Cold War in 1947, the North Atlantic Treaty was signed by the U.S., Canada, and several Western European nations, on April 4, 1949, a treaty that established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization designed to provide collective security against the Soviet Union.
The first bilateral treaty between the U.S. and Soviet Russia/USSR was a consular convention signed in Moscow in June 1964. In 1975, the Helsinki Final Act was signed by a multitude of countries, including the USSR and the US, and, while not having a binding legal power of a treaty, it effectively signified the U.S.-led West's recognition of the Soviet Union's dominance in Eastern Europe and acceptance of the Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that had been effected in 1940. The Act came to play a role in subsequently ending the Cold War.
In the 1970s—1980s, the USSR and the U.S. signed a series of arms control treaties such as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, two Strategic Arms Limitation treaties, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty ; in July 1991 the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was concluded.
In the late 1980s, Eastern Europe nations took advantage of the relaxation of Soviet control under General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and began to break away from communist rule. The relationship greatly improved in the final years of the USSR.
On December 3, 1989, Soviet general secretary Gorbachev and U.S. president George H. W. Bush declared the Cold War over at the Malta Summit.
Both countries agreed to cut their strategic nuclear weapons by 30 percent, and the Soviet Union promised to reduce its intercontinental ballistic missile force by 50 percent. In August 1991, hard-line Communists launched a coup against Gorbachev; while the coup quickly fell apart, it broke the remaining power of Gorbachev and the central Soviet government. Later that month, Gorbachev resigned as general secretary of the Communist party, but remained president of the Soviet Union, and Russian president Boris Yeltsin ordered the seizure of Soviet property. Gorbachev clung to power as the president of the Soviet Union until December 25, 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved. Fifteen states emerged from the Soviet Union, with the largest and most populous one, Russia, taking full responsibility for all the rights and obligations of the USSR under the Charter of the United Nations, including the financial obligations. As such, Russia assumed the Soviet Union's UN membership and permanent membership on the Security Council, nuclear stockpile and the control over the armed forces; Soviet embassies abroad became Russian embassies. Bush and Yeltsin met in February 1992, declaring a new era of "friendship and partnership". In January 1993, Bush and Yeltsin agreed to START II, which provided for further nuclear arms reductions on top of the original START treaty.
History
Dissolution of the Soviet Union through Yeltsin's terms (1991–99)
With Communist politicians and parties in Eastern Europe mostly defunct, on December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union self-dissolved, and the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose association was formed on December 8–21 by eventually 12 of the 15 Soviet constituent Union Republics, leaving out earlier the three Baltic states. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic became the Russian Federation. It was now an independent state that inherited the USSR's UN Security Council permanent membership and became the sole continuator state to the USSR and one of 12 successor states to the USSR.Security issues have always been among the most important between the U.S. and Russia. Immediately after the signing of the Agreement establishing the Commonwealth of Independent States on December 8, 1991, Russian president Yeltsin called U.S. president George H. W. Bush and specifically read him Article 6 of the Agreement. "First of all, I talked with USSR Minister of Defense Shaposhnikov. I want to read the 6th Article of the Agreement. As a matter of fact Shaposhnikov fully agreed and supported our position. I am now reading Article 6."... "Please note well the next paragraph, Mr. President."... "Dear George, I am finished. This is extremely, extremely important. Because of the tradition between us, I couldn't even wait ten minutes to call you." According to the text of Article 6, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus form a "common military and strategic space" and "united armed forces."
Current US Secretary of State James Baker stated that no one but Russia could control Soviet nuclear weapons, in particular, making a statement on December 10, 1991, at Princeton University.
On December 21, 1991, Boris Yeltsin, President of Russia, sent a letter to NATO asking it to consider accepting Russia as a member of the alliance sometime in the future. In the letter to NATO, Yeltsin stated, "This would contribute to an atmosphere of mutual understanding and trust and would strengthen stability and cooperation on the European continent. We regard this relationship as serious and wish to develop this dialog on all fronts, both on the political and military levels. Today we raise the issue of Russia's membership in NATO, however, we see this as a long-term political goal." The Collective Security Treaty within the framework of the Commonwealth of Independent States was signed On May 15, 1992..
On January 31, 1992, Yeltsin attended a UN Security Council meeting and said: "I think the time has come to consider creating a global defence system for the world community. We are ready to participate actively in building and putting in place a pan-European collective security system – in particular during the Vienna talks and the upcoming post-Helsinki-II talks on security and cooperation in Europe. Russia regards the United States and the West not as mere partners but rather as allies.
Strobe Talbott, who was Washington's chief expert on Russia, has argued that Clinton hit it off with Russian Boris Yeltsin, the president of Russia 1991–1999:
As the collapse of the Soviet Union appeared imminent, the United States and their NATO allies grew concerned of the risk of nuclear weapons held in the Soviet republics falling into enemy hands. The Cooperative Threat Reduction program was initiated by the Nunn–Lugar Act, which was authored and cosponsored by Sens. Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar. According to the CTR website, the purpose of the CTR Program was originally "to secure and dismantle weapons of mass destruction and their associated infrastructure in former Soviet Union states."
Relations between Yeltsin and the administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton started off well, but deteriorated after 1997. Yeltsin and his foreign minister Andrey Kozyrev made a high priority Russia's full membership into the family of democratic nations. They wanted to be a partner of the United States. At home they tried to create democratic institutions and a free-market capitalist system.
In 1993, both nations signed the START II arms control treaty that was designed to ban the use of multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles on intercontinental ballistic missiles. The treaty was eventually ratified by both countries, yet it was never implemented and was formally abandoned in 2002, following the U.S.'s withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
Clinton and Yeltsin were personally friendly. Washington encouraged the rapid transition to a liberal capitalist system in Russia. Clinton provided rich talking points but provided less than $3 billion, and much was paid to American contractors. The Russians—aware of the Marshall Plan in the 1940s—had counted on far larger sums. A 1995 NATO study on enlarging the alliance, and the 1999 admission of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland into NATO, alarmed Russia. With the Cold War over, Russians felt NATO's original role was no longer needed. It feared its dramatic move eastward meant an escalation of NATO's historic role in containment of Russian goals. Fears over NATO enlargement contributed to the rise of Vladimir Putin and his emphasis on Russian nationalism and security issues.
On January 14, 1994, Russian president Boris Yeltsin said at a meeting with his American counterpart Bill Clinton in Novo-Ogaryovo.
"Russia has to be the first country to join NATO. Then the others from Central and Eastern Europe can come in. There should be a kind of cartel of the U.S., Russia, and the Europeans to help ensure and improve world security." "In truth, Russia is not yet ready to join NATO. Russia firsts needs to start thinking about reactions in other areas. There is a potential Chinese reaction. As a result, without cooperation between the two of us it is hard to envisage continuation of a peaceful and stable world. If we continue to work together as you suggest, we can do much to ensure peace and stability for Europe and for the rest of the world."
In September 1994, Boris Yeltsin addressed the UN General Assembly and mentioned the role of the CSCE in the European security system. Russia had previously proposed the idea of increasing the role of the CSCE to the detriment of NATO. Yeltsin's national security aide Yuri Baturin noted that after the end of the Cold War, 'the time of NATO has passed,' and therefore the alliance 'should change its mechanisms and goals taking into account Russia's military and political weight.' Baturin believes that 'a new mechanism of European security could be born from the combination of the CSCE and NATO, where the CSCE bodies would represent the political and diplomatic part, and NATO bodies would represent the military part.' But Yeltsin himself did not make such a statement. By 1995 the Agreement on the creation the Commonwealth of Independent States, including the Article 6 on "common military and strategic space", came into force for all 12 countries.
On March 21, 1997, Yeltsin stated to Bill Clinton in Finland: "Our position has not changed. It remains a mistake for NATO to move eastward. But I need to take steps to alleviate the negative consequences of this for Russia. I am prepared to enter into an agreement with NATO not because I want to but because it is a forced step. There is no other solution for today. The principal issues for me are the following. The agreement must be legally binding – signed by all 16 Allies. Decisions by NATO are not to be taken without taking into account the concerns or opinions of Russia. Also, nuclear and conventional arms cannot move eastward into new members to the borders of Russia, thus creating a new cordon sanitaire aimed at Russia. But one thing is very important: enlargement shouldn't embrace the former Soviet republics. I cannot sign any agreement without such language. Especially Ukraine. If you get them involved, it will create difficulties in our talks with Ukraine on a number of issues."
Russia stridently opposed the U.S.-led NATO military operation against Serbia and Montenegro over Kosovo that began in March 1999. In December 1999, while on a visit to China, President Yeltsin verbally assailed Clinton for criticizing Russia's tactics in Chechnya emphatically stating that Russia remained a nuclear power.