ABSTRACT
Russia’s engagement with the key Western security institutions was significantly enhanced by the outcome of the NATO Lisbon summit in November 2010, which elevated the task of cultivating this partnership to one of the top priorities for the Alliance. Yet this engagement remained unsteady, and many Russian commentators argued that the issue of the inadequacy of the European security system for the scope and character of new challenges was not addressed (Lukyanov 2010a). President Dmitrii Medvedev kept raising this issue at every meeting with his European counterparts with a persistency that became habitual, without becoming entirely rational. At the December 2010 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) summit in Astana, he lamented that the idea of a new legally binding pact, which he had brainstormed at the very start of his presidency, was ‘a long way ahead of its time’ (Medvedev 2010). Yet the serious difficulties this summit faced in accomplishing the relatively simple task of reconfirming the Helsinki principles demonstrated that the divergence of views on the ways and means of strengthening security in wider Europe cannot be overcome by diplomatic manoeuvring (Gabuev 2010).
