Short answers, pulled from the story.
Formal diplomatic ties between the Russian Empire and the United States were established in 1809, though official contact between the two had begun in 1776. The current Russia-United States relationship dates to 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved and the Russian Federation inherited its permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 following the collapse of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych's government that February, citing a referendum held on the 16th of March 2014. The United States called the referendum illegal and brought a resolution against it to the UN Security Council, which Russia vetoed while China abstained.
At their July 2018 summit in Helsinki, Donald Trump's public comments appeared to side with Vladimir Putin over the U.S. intelligence community's findings on election interference. Senator John McCain called the joint press conference 'one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.'
Edward Snowden fled to Russia after leaking hundreds of thousands of pages of secret U.S. government documents in 2013, passing first through Hong Kong. Russia granted him political asylum that July, and he remained in the country as of October 2023.
In February 2025, during the second Trump administration, the United States voted against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The vote departed from the American position held since 2014, and came alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's order suspending offensive U.S. cyber operations against Russia.
The Nunn-Lugar Act, cosponsored by Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, created the Cooperative Threat Reduction program to secure and dismantle weapons of mass destruction across the former Soviet states. It responded to fears, as the Soviet Union collapsed, that nuclear weapons scattered across its former republics could fall into the wrong hands.