The West’s mistake with Russia was expecting it to Westernize without any prospect of integration into Western institutions. NATO and the EU wanted a say in Moscow’s affairs while denying it a voice in broader European issues.
This was both wrong and unsustainable and now has brought us to a situation where, after 300 years, Russia has ended its Western-centric foreign policy. The EU has not yet recognized the truly historic shift that has occurred. In the early 18th century, Peter the Great sought to return Russia to Europe. But now, after a brief revival in the 1990s and 2000s, the dream of a Greater Europe has been recognized to be just that, a dream.
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