Russia's President Boris Yeltsin has declared the need to reconcile with the West — a wise decision against the backdrop of a new willingness by Moscow's creditors to reschedule Russian debts. Premier Sergey Stepashin, while on a visit to the U.S., tried not to remind his interlocutors about the awkward demarche of his predecessor Yevgeny Primakov, whose airplane made a U-turn over the Atlantic. Finally, Moscow received one of Slobodan Milosevic's chief opponents, President of Montenegro Milo Djukanovic, which is natural if we take into account Montenegro's traditional orientation toward Russia, and strange if we recall that Mr. Djukanovic enlisted primary support nowhere else but in Western capital cities.
However, while the current behavior of the Russian leadership is quite clear, it is all too difficult to explain its actions in the previous months. After all, Russia quarreled with the West, not the other way round. It is not Al Gore who refused to fly to Moscow, but Mr. Primakov who cancelled his trip to Washington. At the same time, America did not need Russian loans. Just the reverse... It is not the West but Moscow that boasted of having influence over Milosevic, and at the same time Moscow failed to talk the Belgrade dictator into accepting the international terms for the Kosovo settlement before the beginning of NATO bombings and keep him from ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.
Now the wind seems to be returning according to its circuit. And the point is not in who stood to gain from the foreign-policy turnabout, but in the gross non-constructiveness and lack of principles in the Russian political elite. No sooner had a hint been dropped that the enemy is, as before, in the West, than the minister of foreign affairs began to make bellicose speeches, the generals decided they live again in the Soviet Union, and journalists kowtowed at press conferences to the Yugoslav ambassador, Milosevic Sr., and all but shouted at the ambassador of Albania who refused to agree to the eviction and extermination of his compatriots.
But today the same people hug and kiss Madeleine Albright, discuss joint actions in Kosovo with the NATO military, and write articles on the authoritarian Belgrade regime and the bold Djukanovic...
I wonder what they will be doing at the next turnabout.






