On the history of Russian foreign policy: Primakov's “paradigm”

Abstract

Based on a reading of the published works by the former Russian Foreign and Prime Minister Evgeny Primakov, with a focus on his tenure in the governments of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, the article dwells upon some fundamental vectors of Russian foreign policy in international relations, marked actually by a political and diplomatic crisis in the relationship between Russia and the United States and its allies. The influence of this statesman's ideas on Russian diplomacy, in its aspects of international security, NATO's role in Europe, the crisis in the Middle East and the architecture of world order, suggests a “paradigm”. Such a paradigm, in its general features, shapes an inherent conceptual core of the current international strategy, followed by the governments of Vladimir Putin.