ABSTRACT
During Putin's decade-and-a-half in power, the idea that Russia stands at the core of one of several 'centres' in a multipolar – or, as Russians prefer to call it, 'polycentric' – world has firmly taken root; few would dispute that the wars in both Georgia and Ukraine were, in large part, driven by an exclusive Russian claim to its immediate geographic neighbourhood. In many respects, the end of the Cold War marked a 'year zero' in Russian foreign policy making: beyond the realities of the Soviet collapse lay an unfamiliar world. Throughout the post-Cold War era, Russia and the EU have maintained an ambiguous relationship. Russian attitudes towards the EU have regularly moved back and forth between advocating integration of the whole Eurasian space into one single security and/or economic area and stressing the separateness of both Russia and the former Soviet Union from the West, seeing the EU as a potential partner and seeing it as a potential threat.
