In 2009, after Putin had ceded the Presidency to Medvedev, he hosted Obama at his country residence and lectured the U.S. President on the history of American deceptions. It was an hour before Obama managed more than “hello.” McFaul, who was at that meeting, said, “It was grossly inaccurate, but that is his theory of the world.” Putin demanded that the U.S. cede to him the former Soviet republics—Ukraine above all—as a Russian sphere of influence. He felt that the United States had, in the glow of post-Cold War triumphalism, pushed Russia around, exploiting its weakness to ignore Yeltsin’s protests and bomb Belgrade and Kosovo. Gorbachev had always said that the U.S. had promised that, in exchange for his acquiescence to the reunification of Germany, NATO would not expand to the east. In 2004, NATOabsorbed seven new countries—Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, and the three Baltic states, which Putin took as a particular offense and a geopolitical threat. And then, later that year, came the Orange Revolution, in Ukraine, which Putin saw as a Western project and a foreshadowing of an assault on him.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/watching-eclipse
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/watching-eclipse
