Where Did it All Go Wrong? An Analysis of Russian Relations with Western Nations

With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, tensions between Russia and Western nations have once again started to flare up. The purpose of this senior thesis is to analyze the past two decades of relations between Russia and the West, with a specific eye towards relations with the US, NATO, and the EU. The goal is to understand why, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and a brief period of hopefulness, relations between these two sides have once again started to sour and examine what potential opportunities were missed that could have changed the trajectory of the relationship. The thesis begins with a review of past scholarship on the matter to highlight the three main arguments explaining this negative trend in the relations. These three main factors - Putin, Russian bureaucracy, and Russian cultural attitudes towards the West - are then used as the focus of this thesis’s analysis. The methodology of counterfactualism is used to analyze potential missed opportunities for a better relationship between Russia and the West and argue that, had one of the three primary factors been absent at critical junctures over the past twenty years, a better future could have been achieved.