Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia's security culture concentrated mostly on domestic dangers coming from economic deterioration and sociological difficulties (Military Doctrine 1993; National Security Concept 1997).
External security threats to Russia were to be tackled in cooperation with the West.
Russia seemed to be prepared to cooperate with, if not join, the West.
However, Europe and the US largely disregarded Russia's interests and concerns (Cohen 2001; Kennan, quoted in Friedman 1998), expanding their engagement in what had previously been the Soviet sphere of dominance and attempting to restrict Moscow's capacity to re-establish its major position in the area.
At the same time, political events in Russia drew increasing condemnation from both Brussels and Washington.
In order to prevent the Communists from regaining power, the US was heavily engaged in assuring President Boris Yeltsin's re-election in 1996. (Goldgeier and McFaul 2003).
Although, particularly after Putin took power, Russian views and practices toward the West evolved.
The Bush administration's unilateral decision to invade Iraq in 2003, as well as other Western initiatives, such as NATO and EU expansion eastward; the US decision to deploy an antimissile system in Poland and the Czech Republic; the EU's commitment to a new neighborhood policy; and Western support for the "color revolutions" that challenged, if not deposed, Moscow's allies in Kyiv, Tb, contributed to this shift in strategic culture.
Official Russian responses to what they perceived as mounting threats to their fundamental national security interests included a change in national identity and self-image that questioned Russia's European origins and linked it to a larger Eurasia.
As Russia pursued its objective of re-establishing itself as the main regional force throughout Eurasia and as a vital global player, it was joined by a rising challenge to the West's dominating position, both in Central and Eastern Europe and worldwide.
To put it another way, the evolving Russian attitude to the West, which has had such an influence on ties, has old origins in Soviet perceptions of the capitalist West, and more recent foundations in Western actions in former Yugoslavia and elsewhere.
As previously stated, Russian resistance grew in response to the United States' decision to act militarily in Iraq as part of the "war on terror." Moscow, as well as a number of US allies, were vehemently opposed to the intervention, which laid the ground for a worsening of Russian–US ties (Ambrosio 2005).
Other events, such as the EU's new neighborhood policy, exacerbated the worsening trend in Russia–Western ties.
Although Russian authorities have been vocal in their opposition to NATO's eastward expansion throughout the 1990s, they were not originally hostile to post-communist nations entering the European Union.
By the early 2000s, however, Russia had realized that EU membership for post-communist states would not only reduce Russian export markets, but would also be part of a much broader Western economic-political-social strategy to integrate East European states and societies into the Western world order, undermining Moscow's long-term interests in a region associated with Russian identity and status.
The European Neighborhood Policy, announced in 2004, aimed at tying six former Soviet republics closer to the EU without granting them full membership, as well as visible support for political upheavals in several post-Soviet states known as color revolutions, are key factors in explaining the evolving tensions in Russia–EU relations.
These were just veiled attempts by Western governments and NGOs to alter these nations' political orientation toward deeper links with the West, as seen from Moscow.
"We saw what disastrous repercussions the wave of so-called color revolutions has led to," Putin said recently.
This is both a lesson and a warning for us.
We must do everything possible to ensure that nothing comparable occurs in Russia" (Putin, cited in Korsunskaya 2014).
In the views of the Putin regime, this phrase also illustrates the intimate relationship between internal and foreign security.
In summary, by about 2005, Moscow's leadership saw post-communist nations' continuous integration into Western political, economic, and security institutions as a long-term danger to Russia's determination to re-establish its leading position in Eurasia, as well as the Putin government's stay on power.
Putin started openly claiming that the fall of the Soviet Union was the most devastating geopolitical event of the twentieth century, and he began arguing that NATO and the United States were severe dangers to Russia and world security in general about this time.
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