Russian Foreign Policy

As Russia's economy has grown, so have the country's global involvement and influence, which often take forms that the United States neither expects nor likes, as the August 2008 conflict in Georgia demonstrated…

This book assesses the explanatory utility of different approaches to account for post-Soviet Russia’s foreign policy towards the West. It argues that only by focusing both on external constraints and changes in the Russian leadership’s foreign policy thinking can we explain major facets of Russia’s conduct from 1992-2007.

Almost three years after the first voluntary handover of power in Russian history, this book examines Putin's management of this complex agenda, and considers how Moscow's current approach to international relations resembles and differs from that under Yeltsin.