Foreign relations of Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 23rd of December 1991, twelve European nations published a joint declaration acknowledging that Russia would inherit all the international rights and obligations of the Soviet Union, including its seat at the United Nations. Two days later, the USSR ceased to exist. From that moment, the foreign relations of the Russian Federation became a story of competing visions: who should Russia be, and what should it want from the world? Three rival schools of thought inside the Kremlin fought over those questions ever since. One camp sought a warm embrace of the West. Another wanted to rebuild something resembling Soviet dominance. A third looked east, to the vast Eurasian landmass, and imagined a civilization entirely its own. The answers Russia chose, and when it chose them, would reshape alliances across four continents, trigger the largest land war in Europe since 1945, and land Russia on an official list of adversaries maintained by more than 140 nations.

• 2. Three Schools, One Kremlin

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  Andrei Kozyrev, the first foreign minister of the new Russian Federation, represented the Atlanticist vision: align with the United States, join the West, and leave Soviet-era confrontation behind. That ideology dominated the early 1990s but came under fire for what critics called a failure to defend Russian prestige in the former Soviet republics. The turning point came in 1996, when Yevgeny Primakov replaced Kozyrev as foreign minister, signaling a shift toward a more nationalist posture that prioritized Russian pre-eminence over Western partnership.

  Running beneath both camps was a deeper philosophical current: Eurasianism, a school of thought that predated the Soviet Union entirely. Its earliest major ideologue was the Russian historian Nikolai Trubetzkoy, who rejected the Europhilic legacy of Tsar Peter I and argued that Russia should embrace what he called the Asiatic "legacy of Chinggis Khan" to build a trans-continental Eurasian state. Trubetzkoy equated Liberalism with Eurocentric imperialism and held that Russia belonged to a distinct Slavic, Turkic, and Asiatic cultural space.

  After the Soviet collapse, philosopher Aleksandr Dugin gave Eurasianism renewed public ascendency through his writings, and under Vladimir Putin it moved from intellectual circles into official policy. In 2023, Putin approved a formal document titled The Concept of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation, which defined Russia as a "unique country-civilization and a vast Eurasian and Euro-Pacific power" seeking a "Greater Eurasian Partnership" with China, India, and the Global South. The same document identified the United States and other English-speaking countries as the chief architects of what it called aggressive anti-Russian policy by the collective West.

• 3. The Munich Turn

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  At the annual Munich Conference on Security Policy in February 2007, Putin told an audience of Western defense ministers and heads of state that the United States had displayed what he called an "almost unconstrained hyper use of force in international relations." He argued that the result was that no one felt safe, and that such a policy stimulated an arms race. U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates replied at the same conference that one Cold War was quite enough. Both sides publicly denied a new Cold War had begun, but in June 2007, just before the 33rd G8 Summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, 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."

  The personal dimensions of Putin's Western relationships were uneven. His ties with German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder were notably warm: the two negotiated a major Baltic gas pipeline in 2005, and Schröder attended Putin's 53rd birthday celebration in Saint Petersburg. Schröder later accepted a job with the Russian-led consortium behind that pipeline after leaving office. Relations with Schröder's successor Angela Merkel were described as "cooler" and "more business-like." With U.S. President George W. Bush, Putin described their eight-year relationship as "mostly positive" at their final summit in the Black Sea resort of Sochi in April 2008, though they failed to resolve the dispute over a U.S. missile defense system planned for Poland and the Czech Republic. At that meeting Putin offered a counterproposal: shared use of the Soviet-era Gabala radar station in Azerbaijan, in operation since 1986, so that interceptors could be based in Turkey or Iraq instead of Eastern Europe.

  In September 2007, Putin visited Indonesia, becoming the first Russian leader to visit that country in more than 50 years, and signed a uranium trade deal in Sydney with Australian Prime Minister John Howard in what was also the first visit by a Russian president to Australia. The back-to-back trips reflected a deliberate effort to build Asia-Pacific ties as Western relationships soured.

• 4. Litvinenko and the British Rift

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  The death of former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko from radiation poisoning in London injected sharp new poison into the Russia-UK relationship at the end of 2006. Litvinenko accused Putin of directing his assassination in a statement released after his death by his friend Alex Goldfarb. Critics doubted that Litvinenko was the true author of the statement. When asked, Putin dismissed it, saying that a statement released posthumously "naturally deserves no comment."

  On the 20th of July 2007, Prime Minister Gordon Brown expelled four Russian diplomats after Putin refused to extradite former KGB agent Andrei Lugovoi, wanted for the murder. The Russian constitution prohibits extraditing Russian nationals. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband noted that other countries had amended their constitutions to comply with instruments like the European Arrest Warrant. Russia responded by expelling British diplomats, suspending visa issuance to UK officials, and freezing counterterrorism cooperation. Alexander Shokhin, president of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, warned that British investors would face greater scrutiny from tax and regulatory authorities and could lose out in government tenders.

  The expulsions were described as the biggest rift between the two countries since they expelled each other's diplomats in 1996 after a spying dispute. Some analysts traced the crisis partly to Britain's 2003 decision to grant political asylum to Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky, once Putin's patron, who had called for the overthrow of Putin earlier in 2007.

• 5. Military Signals and the CFE Crisis

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  In August 2007, following Peace Mission joint exercises by Shanghai Cooperation Organisation member states, Putin announced the permanent resumption of long-distance patrol flights by Russia's strategic bombers, suspended since 1992. The announcement came directly after the first-ever joint Russian-Chinese military exercises held on Russian territory.

  On the 5th of December 2007, Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov told Putin that 11 ships, including the aircraft carrier Kuznetsov, would take part in the first major Russian naval sortie into the Mediterranean since Soviet times. The operation was to be backed by 47 aircraft including strategic bombers. Military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer, writing in Novaya Gazeta, assessed the Kuznetsov as accident-prone and more of a menace to her crew than to any adversary.

  On the 11th of December 2007, Russia suspended participation in the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. The United States formally stated the next day that it "deeply regretted" the decision and noted that Russian conventional forces were the largest on the European continent. NATO's primary concern was that the suspension could accelerate Russian military presence in the Northern Caucasus.

  In October 2007, Putin visited Tehran for the Second Caspian Summit, the first visit by a Kremlin leader to Iran since Joseph Stalin attended the Tehran Conference in 1943. At a press conference afterward, Putin stated that all Caspian states have the right to develop peaceful nuclear programs without restriction. The assembled leaders also agreed that none would allow a third-party state to use their territory as a base for military action against any other participant.

• 6. Ukraine and the Sanctions Cascade

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  During the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election, Putin twice visited Ukraine before voting concluded to show support for Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, widely seen as a pro-Kremlin candidate. Putin congratulated Yanukovych on his anticipated victory before official results were released. Critics called this unwarranted interference in the affairs of a sovereign state. The episode intersected with what became known as the Orange Revolution.

  Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 opened a sustained rupture with the European Union. For the first time since 1960, the United States cancelled a summit with Russia in 2013, after Moscow granted asylum to Edward Snowden. Russia also directly intervened in the Syrian civil war in October 2015, turning the tide in favor of Bashar al-Assad's government, deepening tensions with Washington and triggering a further deterioration with Turkey after the Turkish Air Force shot down a Russian jet fighter in November 2015.

  On the 24th of February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Japan, and others imposed sweeping economic and political sanctions. That same year, 141 countries approved a UN resolution condemning the invasion and demanding a full withdrawal. More than 600 Russian diplomats were declared persona non grata in 2022. Russia published a formal Unfriendly Countries List naming states with which relations were strained or severed, including Ukraine since 2022, Georgia since 2008, Bhutan, the Federated States of Micronesia since 2022, and the Solomon Islands.

• 7. Energy, Africa, and Structural Limits

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  Russia's international standing depends heavily on fossil fuel revenues. The country is one of the world's three largest coal exporters, and the coal industry sustains specific Russian towns and provinces. Russia ranks 148th out of 156 countries in the GeGaLo index of Geopolitical Gains and Losses after energy transition. A shift to renewable energy would sharply reduce demand for Russian raw materials and with it a primary source of Russian influence.

  Russia's formal alliances are comparatively weak. The Collective Security Treaty Organization was meant to succeed the Warsaw Pact but remains far less integrated than NATO. Russia participates in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, though China plays the leading role there and the SCO is a cooperation group rather than a military alliance. In 2015, Russia formed the Eurasian Economic Union with Armenia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus.

  Since the 2022 invasion, Russia has deepened ties across Africa and South America, drawing on goodwill built during the Soviet era when Moscow sided with liberation movements against colonialism. Many African and South American countries abstained from voting against Russia at the UN over Ukraine in 2022. In 2024, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso agreed with Russia to obtain telecom and surveillance satellites for border security. All three faced Islamist insurgencies and had recently broken with Western allies. Russia has also been accused of waging hybrid warfare across Europe: sabotage, espionage, and influence operations intended to weaken European resolve. The Soviet Union supplied more than $11 billion in arms to Algeria between 1962 and 1989, and Russia remains Algeria's largest arms supplier. The Kuril Islands dispute with Japan, unresolved for decades, has hindered bilateral cooperation; since 2017, high-level talks involving Prime Minister Shinzo Abe have continued in an attempt to find a path forward.