Missile Defences and Yeltsin’s Russia

Abstract

Although the ending of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union significantly changed the context of relations between Moscow and Washington, during these years missile defences continued to play an important role in Russian diplomacy. In his first address to the United Nations Security Council as President of an independent, post- Soviet Russia, Boris Yeltsin called for the Americans to join Russia in a research and development effort to create a new global system to protect their territories from attack by nuclear missiles. Yeltsin’s speech was intended to send a signal to Washington that Moscow’s attitude towards the West was friendly and that it was willing to cooperate in all fields, even those which were formerly the most sensitive. By the end of Yeltsin’s second term, however, this proposed cooperation on missile defences had not materialized in any substantial form and instead Russia was under pressure from the United States to agree to amendments to the ABM Treaty which would permit the Americans to deploy a theatre missile defence — a development which many Russians feared would be the first step towards a national missile defence for the United States.KeywordsArmed ForceSecurity PolicyUnited Nations Security CouncilMilitary ThreatMissile AttackThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.