Russia's Anger and Frustration Over Ukraine's Drift to the West

When Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov was trying to warn former Soviet satellite Poland against joining the U.S.-led NATO military alliance in the 1990s, he laced gallows humor with veiled menace.

"We know we can't stop you joining NATO. And you know that we know that we can't stop you joining NATO," the late Polish Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek quoted Primakov as telling him. "Just don't expect us to enjoy it."

As Moscow has tried to dissuade former Soviet republic Ukraine from signing a far-reaching trade and cooperation agreement with the European Union this month, there has been less humor but plenty of menace.

"My assumption is that my country will make it very expensive," said Sergei Karaganov, head of Russia's Council for Foreign and Defence Policy think-tank and a former adviser to President Vladimir Putin.

More than two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia is still suffering from phantom pain in its amputated limbs. It aches each time a former Soviet republic takes a step towards integration with the West.

The pain is greatest in Ukraine, a country of 46 million with a $330 billion economy, which voted for independence from Moscow in 1991 but which many Russians regard as the historic cradle of their own nation.

Putin managed to prevent Ukraine and Georgia joining the path to NATO membership in 2008, when German and French opposition coupled with Ukrainian public hostility thwarted U.S. President George W. Bush's drive to expand the Atlantic alliance to Moscow's southwestern borders.

Western negotiators said at the time the diplomatic understanding was that Russia would not object if those countries built closer civilian economic ties with the EU.

However, Moscow's Cold War hackles have been raised again now that Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova are preparing to seal association agreements with the 28-nation bloc at an Eastern Partnership summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, on November 28-29.

"Unfortunately in Russia, this is seen only in geopolitical terms, as an attempt by the European Union to flex its geopolitical muscles," Karaganov told Reuters.

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