December 15, 2007 By Robert Amsterdam

A Lack of Trust in Russia

What’s behind the Kremlin’s deep-seated suspicion of the West? The BBC’s Rupert Wingfield Hayes takes a trip to Russia and finds himself quite unwelcome, and also quite unable to find his way around. His column is annoyingly anti-Russian, which always drives me crazy, but is extrapolated largely from the hard facts of how the UK-Russia relationship has so disastrously deteriorated. BBC: “Speaking afterwards one of his colleagues put it to me this way: “In the 1990s we had an opportunity to turn Russia outwards towards the West. But we failed. Now it’s gone, and it won’t be back for at least a generation.”