ABSTRACT
NATO Secretary General Solana wrote off Yeltsin's sputtering about air strikes as "a domestic element closely linked to the elections in December and pressure from the 'nationalists'", and a NATO statement in September cautioned against exacerbating Russia's "genuine or faked outrage" over NATO expansion. The Russian leadership devised a new tactic for the NATO deception in 1995 by threatening to form an anti-Western alliance with other "anti-Western" states, including China, Iran, and India, a supposed counter to NATO expansion. Russia continued its rhetorical broadsides against Western policies in Yugoslavia even as it supported the policies in practice. The speed of the retractions of policy statements on Yugoslavia by Russian officials had now become bewilderingly fast. Russia's Contact Group partners stepped up their "charm offensive" by paying tribute to Russia's role in the peace process and thanking it for restoring natural gas shipments to Bosnia.
