NATO and Russia: the future of a relationship in Tatters

ENRussian opposition to NATO enlargement has been vocal and well known. Yet before NATO set course on accepting new members, Russian leadership saw the Partnership for Peace launched in early 1994 as the framework that would provide equal status to all partners of the Alliance2. In some respects, already by the end of 1994, the time of the OSCE Budapest Summit, cold-war-like tensions were felt again. When it became clear that Russia was not able to prevent the enlargement, it had to find a way to live with it. In the Russian view, the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act concluded in May 1997 was supposed to address the first true post-Cold-War enlargement in 1999. What a number of capitals across Europe saw as an appealing opportunity, was seen in Moscow as a reason to be seriously worried. By 1999 the NATO Kosovo campaign triggered a severe crisis that has had repercussions for the NATO-Russia relations, as well as for the Balkans, to this day. Vladimir Putin was named Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation at the time of the Yugoslavia bombings and did not hide his concerns in relation to policies conducted by the West. [...].