Why make an enemy of Russia?

William Pfaff International Herald Tribune
Wednesday, April 13, 2005

PARIS U.S. and European Union policies toward Russia are more dangerous than they may seem. What has been happening on Russia's borders could reasonably be interpreted by the government of President Vladimir Putin as a Western campaign to detach and alienate the neighboring states that Moscow describes as its "Near Abroad."

In an important respect, Putin's government has invited this interference on its frontier. It has combined complacence with complaisance in corrupt leadership in Belarus, Ukraine and the former Soviet republics in Central Asia.

When the Soviet Union was dissolved by Boris Yeltsin in 1991, time should have been up for the whole system. Yeltsin told the leaders of the former Soviet states to take as much freedom as they could manage. In fact, most took as much power, and as much of their states' wealth and resources, as they could.