Russian Security Policy and Cooperation with the West

The West must find new ways to cooperate with Russia now that Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev have used its energy revenues to transform the country into a resurgent power and developed an assertive policy towards the West.

The Russian Federation has come back to the international arena as a resurgent superpower thanks to its oil and gas revenues and the leadership of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev. An assertive Russian superpower has adopted a tough anti-Western stance in its external security policy against both NATO’s expansion towards the East and against the deployment of the US missile shield programme in Europe. The Kremlim has used energy as an instrument of power in the Ukraine and has employed military power in Georgia, and new documents, such as the 2003 Defence White Paper, the 2007 Overview of Foreign Policy, the 2008 Foreign Policy Concept and the 2009 National Security Strategy express a consistent line of thought in Putin and Medvedev’s foreign and security policy. This ARI reviews the developments in Russia’s foreign security policy,the continuity in the ideas and action of both Russian leaders, the challenges and opportunities of Russian-Western cooperation in Afghanistan and the energy security and military-operational issues that can be addressed through a bottom-up approach.