This book sets out to explain the complex nature of Russian foreign policy in the post-Soviet era, from the collapse of the USSR in December 1991 and the accession of Boris Yeltsin to the end of Vladimir Putin’s second year as President of the Russian Federation. The tale narrated in the coming pages is a messy one, beset by innumerable contradictions and flavoured by human personality to an uncommon degree. When Winston Churchill speculated that the key to understanding Russia might be ‘national interest’, he could little have imagined the extent to which, more than half a century later, the foreign policy of the largest of the post-Soviet successor states would so reflect the perversity of human nature. Far from exhibiting an underlying if specific pragmatism, Moscow’s relations with the outside world have been liberally streaked with irrationality – at least as we might understand it in the West – and dominated by fundamental dichotomies: continuity and change, consensus and conflict. Easy assumptions about a broader ‘national interest’ and common priorities have been challenged by the politics of sectionalism and personalities, with rationality and logic acquiring multiple, contradictory forms. We enter a realm of smoke and mirrors in which little is as it seems, and where illusion and mythmaking are as much a part of reality as ‘reality’ itself.