FRIENDSHIP AND COOPERATION AGREEMENTS BETWEEN RUSSIA AND CENTRAL EUROPEAN COUNTRIES: 30 YEARS LATER
30 years have passed since the full-scale renewal of relations between Russia and the countries of Central (at that time Eastern) Europe. With an error of one year plus/minus, in 1991, 1992 and 1993, fundamentally new agreements on friendship and cooperation were signed, designed for a long-term perspective and the possibility of bringing relations to a new denominator. Unfortunately, the period of ideological renewal turned out to be short-lived, taking place against the background of the deterioration of economic relations until the mid-1990-ies and in the end, it ran into a wall of lack of strategic vision in rapidly changing international realities and a narrowing space of mutual understanding. Even the exceptional pragmatism of relations with which Russia emerged from Medvedev’s presidency and after Putin’s Munich speech did not save these relations from almost complete destruction, where the years superimposed on the Covid-19 epidemic turned out to be particularly catastrophic and the battle with the Sputnik vaccine was followed by very real hostilities.