ABSTRACT
Among the great foreign policy challenges facing the newly independent Russian Federation in the 1990s was the question of how to deal with European integration. By the end of the decade, when post-Cold War and post-communist transformations had brought Russia closer to the European Union, the Russian leadership had declared that it had made a ‘European choice’ and viewed EU-Russian relations as a ‘strategic partnership’. Yet the path of development towards this declaration was full of twists and paradoxes and provided much material for thinking about the complicated nature of Russia's relations with Europe and the motive forces behind EU-Russian dialogue.
