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RUSSIAN planes and artillery continue to bomb the civilians of breakaway Chechnya, a worrying sign of a cardinal change in the Kremlin’s domestic policy. But Russia’s foreign policy under President Boris Yeltsin and Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev has also made a fundamental shift that is putting it at odds with U.S. interests. At times, in the last year, Russia has behaved constructively, as when it withdrew its troops from the Baltic states, and when it supported the U.S. position on Haiti; at other times—and with increasing frequency—it has begun adopting policies that resemble those of its Soviet predecessor.

Although Foreign Minister Kozyrev recently claimed on Meet the Press that Russia “shall seek full strategic and pragmatic partnership with the U.S.,” the unmistakable drift of Russia’s policies has been in the direction of an often reckless assertion of power. This shift has come in three stages. In 1992, the first year after the collapse of the USSR, Russia began efforts to reassert hegemony over former Soviet republics. Under the pretext of protecting the rights of ethnic Russians and “Russian speakers” in what was dubbed the “near abroad,” Russia began to intervene in the internal affairs of newly independent states. Russian security forces assisted two coup attempts in Azerbaijan, and Russian troops have been involved in conflicts in Moldova, Tajikistan, and Georgia. In 1994, Russian officials began to assert the right to intervene in neighboring states if ethnic Russians were persecuted. On December 12, the head of President Yeltsin’s Department of Citizenship Affairs charged that “most of the new states” discriminate against Russian populations. Also in December, President Yeltsin upped the ante by issuing a decree that unilaterally extends the right of Russian citizenship to citizens of the non-Russian republics of the former USSR, against the objections of most of their leaders.