laws pertaining to humanitarian interventions could pass the Security Council.8 Putin extensively details the late 1990s Balkan turmoil and the NATO action against Serbia over Kosovo as a rallying cry of anti-NATO/anti-Western sentiment within Russia, given how his country was not treated as an “equal partner.”9
An enlarged NATO that remains beholden to the United States, both of which only grew stronger in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, now proved willing to employ military force which it had not done in its entire Cold War existence. Repeated snubbing by the West toward Yeltsin’s Russia over issues of partnership and security also contributed to consternation in Russia. Though seemingly benign in the eyes of the United States the and West, is there any confusion as to how such actions might irk an already cognitively pre-disposed anti-American individual like Putin into retaining if not permanently psychologically justifying his own anti-Americanism? And then, at the end of the 1990s, the lifelong anti-American Vladimir Putin would abruptly emerge from obscurity and become the leader of Russia.
1 Gevorkyan, First Person, 138.
2 Vladimir Putin, “Speech and the Following Discussion at the Munich Conference on Security Policy,” February 11, 2007, http://kremlin.ru/eng/text/speeches/2007/02/11/0138.shtml.
3 Ryan Hendrickson, Diplomacy and War at NATO: The Secretary General and Military Action after the Cold War (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 51, 55.
4 Ibid., 94 — 96.
5 Michael Mandelbaum, “A Perfect Failure: NATO’s War against Yugoslavia,” Foreign Affairs 78, no. 5 (Sept.-Oct., 1999), 7.
6 Rama S. Kumar, “From Kosovo to Georgia: The U.S., NATO and Russia,” Economic and Political Weekly 43, no. 36 (Sept 2008), 25.
7 Dino Kritsiotis, “The Kosovo Crisis and NATO’s Application of Armed Force against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia,” The International and Comparative Law Quarterly 49, no. 2 (April 2000), 347.
8 Ibid., 358
9 Gevorkyan, First Person, 137.
c. Economic Collapse and the Absence of U.S. Aid
Though a topic for a much more in depth analysis beyond the scope of this thesis, it is worthy of a brief discussion of the economic turmoil in Yeltsin’s Russia and more importantly the perceived lack of support offered by the United States to help the newfound “capitalist democracy” in achieving Yeltsin’s promised rapid recovery. Yeltsin’s “shock therapy” to the post-Soviet Russian economy failed to improve the lives of most Russians, leaving many to question the validity of U.S. styled free market capitalism and democracy which had been the basis for a temporary euphoric pro-American mood immediately after the democratic revolution.1 Communism had been blamed for the rotten lives of the Soviet citizens; the United States combatted communism; therefore America and its economic and government systems must be good.2 Within a few years of the Soviet collapse, people had become increasingly disillusioned with the United States. Little to no economic aid had been proffered; America had benefitted the most from the USSR’s collapse and therefore a lack of aid must have been simply another means by which America kept Russia on its knees and incapable of re-asserting its former position on the world scene.3
America had thereby denied Russia an economic recovery while exploiting Russian weakness to gain a greater influence around the globe and especially in continental Europe through NATO. Putin observed and took note; the absence of U.S. aid was but one more piece of evidence supporting his anti-American pre-disposition that America was pre-disposed to antagonism toward Russia. Putin would be unable to influence the situation until nearing the turn of the next century, his century.
1 Shiraev and Zubock, Anti-Americanism in Russia from Stalin to Putin, 49.
2 Ibid., 144.
3 Ibid., 53.
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