http://carnegie.ru/publications/?fa=73568
Quote:Russia’s foreign policy has come full circle in the last 25 years. It started with the rejection of the Soviet Union’s superpower posture, its global geopolitical ambitions, and its ideology.
The Russian Federation positioned itself as a “new Russia” — no longer a superpower, with modest ambitions beyond its borders, and willing to go along with the Soviet Union’s former adversaries who became Moscow’s new friends and mentors.
It was not immediately clear what this new Russia’s national interests were – and whether or how they differed from those of its American and European friends.
But armed conflicts on the outskirts of the former USSR, the wars in the Balkans and NATO’s enlargement to the east, taught Russia’s elites and public some pretty hard lessons about the country’s post-Soviet role.