The basic message to the West is "don't even think of parking here," says Natalya Narochnitskaya, former deputy chair of the State Duma's foreign relations commission and now an executive of the Moscow-based Institute for Democracy and Cooperation, which is funded by Russian business interests.
After a decade that has seen NATO – a 26-nation Western military alliance – absorb all the former USSR's allies and move to the borders of Russia itself, and the US move to install strategic antimissile weapons in Poland and the Czech Republic, Moscow has had enough. "There is a red line, where Russia cannot accept further pressure on its borders in its traditional geopolitical arena," Ms. Narochnitskaya says.
Multipolar era emerging?
Russian policy-makers say the world order has shifted from the bipolar arrangement of the four-decade-long standoff between the US and the USSR, to a brief period of American preeminence, to an emerging multi-polar era in which many powerful players will have to learn to work out their differences.
"We need new mechanisms for strategic security cooperation, because the old ones are not working," says Andrei Klimov, a member of the State Duma's international affairs committee. "There is a new reality in the world, and we need to discuss it openly."
At the center of the current storm are Georgia and Ukraine, both NATO aspirants that Vice President Dick Cheney visited last week with a message of support that is bound to further antagonize Moscow.
