ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the substantially diverging views of Russia and the EU on post-Cold War Europe. It highlights some key trends in Russian foreign policy and in the EU's policies towards its eastern neighbours. The chapter also explores the dynamics of action-reaction to explain how a logic of competition has developed in the interaction between Moscow and Brussels, distinguishing between three stages in their relations. The Strategic Partnership became a continuous balancing exercise between the preferences of Brussels and Moscow. The constructed dichotomy between the perceived normative foreign policy of the EU and the perceived Realpolitik of Russia seems to lead EU policymakers to believe that its policies have neither a geopolitical motivation nor geopolitical consequences. Denis Volkov states that 'successive Russian governments had exploited "the situation if not of conflict then of controversy between Russia and the West"'. With the Ukraine crisis, the constraints on this logic of competition disappeared and escalated into direct confrontation.
