Russia and the West: Where did it all go wrong?_BBC

Russia and the West: Where did it all go wrong?

I am not going to try to give a comprehensive answer to all these questions - the intricacies of this story would require a book the length of Tolstoy's War and Peace! But I am going to try to throw out some pointers.

For Paul R Pillar, a senior fellow at the Centre for Security Studies at Georgetown University and a former senior CIA officer, the initial fault lies with the West.

"The relationship went wrong when the West did not treat Russia as a nation that had shaken off Soviet Communism," he told me. "It should have been welcomed as such into a new community of nations - but instead it was regarded as the successor state of the USSR, inheriting its status as the principal focus of Western distrust."

This original sin, if you like, was compounded by the West's enthusiasm for Nato expansion, first taking in countries like Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, who had long nationalist traditions of struggling against rule from Moscow.

But Nato's expansion didn't end there as it added countries like the three Baltic States, whose territory had been part of the former Soviet Union. Is it any wonder then, the critics ask, that Moscow should baulk also at the idea of Georgia or Ukraine entering the western orbit?

In short, Russia believes that it has been treated unfairly since the end of the Cold War.

This, of course, is not the conventional view in the West, which prefers to focus on Russian "revanchism" - a stance personified by Vladimir Putin, a man who has described the collapse of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century.