![]() ![]() Starting in the spring of 2015, Mary Sarotte decided to invest time in a broad-brush approach. Another group of requests produced two particularly significant Clinton-Yeltsin conversations, in Moscow and Halifax in 1995, at the crucial point just before both men’s make-or-break reelection bids of 1996. These initial, limited declassifications gave us an important first glimpse behind the scenes of Clinton-Yeltsin conversations, including at the Cologne summit of 1999. In the summer of 2012, files began trickling in, first from the State Department and then from the Clinton Library, largely in response to itemized requests for specific summit meeting materials made by Archive staff (Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton) as well as by James Goldgeier with the assistance of Catherine Nielsen. In order to learn more about this crucial era, many years ago the Archive began spearheading an effort to get specific relevant documents declassified. For its part, the United States was willing to cooperate only – in Strobe Talbott’s words – on “what we deem to be legitimate security concerns,” not on everything the Russians claimed to be important. Moscow often felt disrespected, and claimed that its interests and priorities were not being duly considered. Russia was no longer the superpower that had challenged the United States at the height of the Cold War, and it was not even the declining-but-democratizing Soviet Union of Mikhail Gorbachev. And, behind the rhetoric of equality and friendship lay the undeniable reality of an enormous power and status disparity. However, many contentious issues damaged the partnership along the way – most importantly NATO expansion and the military campaign in Kosovo. In return, the Clinton administration provided badly needed economic assistance and used its leverage with international financial institutions to help Russia. Russia even participated in the international peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, became a member of the G-8, and joined the Council of Europe. The Clinton-Yeltsin cooperation also enabled the safe dismantlement and storage of nuclear weapons in Russia as it complied with the START I treaty. Cooperation on non-proliferation efforts, particularly within the framework of the Nunn-Lugar program, led to the successful withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Belarus, Kazakhstan, and above all Ukraine (briefly the third-largest nuclear power in the world due to the amount of Soviet-era weaponry on its territory). The partnership between the United States and Russia that Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin tried to build in the 1990s succeeded only in part – but even that partial success helped to make the world a safer place. Today the National Security Archive publishes the highlights of this release. In July 2018, students of U.S.-Russian relations added hundreds of pages of declassified documents to their required reading list when the Clinton Presidential Library released almost all memoranda of Clinton-Yeltsin conversations in response to requests by historian Mary Sarotte in 2015. * * * * * The Clinton-Yeltsin Relationship in Their Own Words The new records confirm the Bill-Boris camaraderie was genuine but also masked a complex relationship and ultimately an uneven partnership that reflected the diametrically opposite political and economic trajectories of their two nations in the 1990s. tolerating election irregularities, and doing little to oppose Yeltsin as he empowered oligarchs and installed Vladimir Putin as his successor, among other consequences. Washington, D.C., Octo– President Bill Clinton saw Russian leader Boris Yeltsin as indispensable for promoting American interests following the collapse of the Soviet Union, often prompting him to take controversial steps to ensure Yeltsin’s political survival, according to top-level memoranda of conversation just released from the Clinton presidential library.Ĭlinton believed backing Yeltsin personally was necessary to ensure Russian stability and market reform, which he privileged over the development of democracy in the former Soviet republic, a careful reading of the presidential memcons shows. FOIA Advisory Committee Oversight Reports. ![]()
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