Rajan Menon, Foreign Affairs
Well before Putin and Medvedev, it was the government of Boris Yeltsin, a leader now lionized as a democrat by some dispirited Western observers of Russia, that lambasted NATO’s eastward expansion. Andrei Kozyrev, Yeltsin’s first foreign minister, who held the post until 1996, was hailed for his statements about Russia seeking “to join the democratic community of nations with a market economy.” But it was the same Kozyrev who warned as early as 1992 that NATO’s enlargement would divide Europe and empower Russian hard-liners. (He proved prescient.) Under...
