The catalyst behind the Soviet collapse

Boris N. Yeltsin, the burly, bearish peasant who struck the deathblow that shattered the Soviet Union and served as the first president of the shrunken, disorderly Russia that emerged, died Monday. He was 76.

Yeltsin, who had been plagued by heart and other health problems for many years, died of “cardiovascular insufficiency” at a Moscow hospital, Sergei Mironov, head of the Russian presidential administration’s medical center, told reporters.

In a televised speech Monday evening, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin described Yeltsin as “a man thanks to whom a whole epoch began, a new democratic Russia was born, a state free and open to the world.”

“He was a straightforward and brave national leader,” Putin said. “And he was always extremely frank and honest when defending his positions.”

Putin declared Wednesday a national day of mourning. The Kremlin press service announced that a memorial service would be held that day at Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow, followed by burial at the Novodevichy cemetery, where many prominent Russians are buried.

Yeltsin was the first leader in Russian history -- medieval, imperial or Soviet -- to be democratically elected. He was also the first to voluntarily relinquish power, resigning on New Year’s Eve 1999 in favor of Putin.

A man of great ambition and periodic vision, Yeltsin wrenched his country out of more than seven decades of socialist economic planning and Communist Party rule. His forceful stands were key to freeing the Soviet Union’s constituent republics, creating 15 countries stretching from Europe to China. He lifted state controls in Russia on artists, journalists, churches and scholars.

Then he, and Russia with him, floundered. Hobbled by illness, Yeltsin failed to build a stable, prosperous and democratic nation. Economic programs backfired or ran aground. The legal system languished, and corruption and crime flourished in the vacuum. Rapacious businessmen bled the country of cash. Yeltsin launched a ruinous war against the independence-minded republic of Chechnya.

But today’s critics of the post-communist era look back on Yeltsin’s rule as a period of democratic freedoms that are now being chipped away.

Two images capsulize his career: In August 1991, Yeltsin clambered atop a tank outside the Russian parliament, galvanizing popular resistance and squelching a coup by hard-liners seeking to overthrow Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Communist rule ended within weeks, the Soviet Union within months.

More than eight years later, a contrite Yeltsin went on television and resigned, finally acknowledging that he had failed to deliver on his promises of democracy and prosperity.

“I want to ask your forgiveness,” Yeltsin said. “I want to apologize for not making many of our dreams come true.”

Yeltsin’s contradictions were as sweeping as the changes he wrought on his countrymen. He believed he was promoting democracy but concentrated power in his own hands. He criticized Gorbachev for backtracking on reforms and bringing hard-liners into the Kremlin, then did the same. He abhorred the Communist Party and KGB but handpicked a former intelligence agent as his successor.

Gorbachev sent a letter Monday to Yeltsin’s wife, Naina, in which he paid tribute to his successor, who was sometimes an ally and sometimes a rival.

“Our destinies crossed paths in the most difficult years,” Gorbachev wrote, according to a copy released by his office. “Yes, there were differences between us, and they were big ones.... But in these minutes I am thinking about the fact that both of us wanted what was good for the country and its people.”

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Closed to criticism

Some observers have suggested that Yeltsin’s fatal flaw was that he saw himself as the embodiment of Russian democracy. Not knowing how to build the institutions and social practices necessary for civil society, he concentrated on prolonging his reign and neutralizing his opposition. He ignored criticism. His governing style had more in common with that of the monarchs and tyrants who preceded him than with parliamentary democracy.

The West had a hard time knowing how to respond to Yeltsin. At first preferring the smooth rhetoric of Gorbachev, most Western leaders shied away from the brash Russian president. But after Gorbachev resigned, they embraced Yeltsin wholeheartedly, judging that his new nation would need a bold figure to lead it through the post-Soviet disarray.

Some came to regret that stance as Yeltsin became increasingly erratic and ill through two terms as president. But he had marginalized his rivals, and therefore any democratic alternative to his increasingly autocratic leadership.

Under Yeltsin, Russia’s economy lurched from crisis to crisis. Untrained in Western-style policymaking and impatient with detail, Yeltsin repeatedly promoted and demoted ministers and bureaucrats. Under their guidance, he supported a series of unpopular economic programs: “shock therapy” in 1991, “voucher” privatization in 1992-94 and a series of rigged auctions in which the state’s choicest economic properties -- oil and gas companies, precious-metal firms and utilities -- went to Kremlin insiders. Currency changes and devaluations robbed ordinary Russians of their savings more than once.

Eventually, Yeltsin’s Kremlin became a kind of elected monarchy, headed by a distracted czar and riddled with palace intrigue. His circle of advisors shrank, especially as his health deteriorated. He appeared more and more removed from public life, and would disappear for weeks or months with health problems worsened by a reported fondness for vodka. When he reappeared, he would indulge in bursts of activity, berating his underlings for poor performance.

Searching for a successor in his final years in office, Yeltsin changed prime ministers five times in 17 months. The country felt adrift with an unstable captain in command.

Perhaps Yeltsin’s one unassailable achievement was that in 1991 he had the courage to embark on a political and economic transition whose scale and complexity daunted his opponents and arguably dwarfed that attempted by any other country in history. The fact that so much went wrong may say more about the nature of the transition than the man who led it. Perhaps no one else could have done better.

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Humble beginnings

Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was born in the dark days of early Stalinism, on Feb. 1, 1931, in the Ural Mountains village of Butka, near Yekaterinburg.

In the first volume of his autobiography, Yeltsin describes himself as a troublemaker -- impetuous, with a righteous streak.

During World War II, he stole grenades from a weapons warehouse and tried to take one apart with a hammer; the weapon exploded, costing him the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.

He trained as a civil engineer at the Ural Polytechnic Institute and there met his wife, Naina Girina, a student from the Orenburg region of Siberia. After graduating in 1955, Yeltsin worked in civil construction, first as a laborer and then as a foreman.

He joined the Communist Party in 1961, after Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev launched a de-Stalinization effort. Yeltsin became a full-time official in 1968 and first secretary of the Sverdlovsk region -- a post akin to that of a U.S. governor -- in 1976.

Yeltsin’s populist style soon caught the eye of many people, including Gorbachev, then also a regional leader. When Gorbachev was chosen general secretary of the party in 1985, he brought Yeltsin to Moscow as chief of the Central Committee construction department, then a few months later named him head of the Moscow city party, a role similar to that of mayor.

From that point on, the two men’s fates were interlocked.

For two years, Yeltsin was one of Gorbachev’s brightest and boldest allies. He arrested corrupt officials and forswore his limousine to ride the subway and buses. He demanded that more fresh fruit and vegetables be offered in stores.

At first his tirades fit nicely into Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms, and Yeltsin attacked layer after layer of the party leadership. Eventually, either from conviction or ambition, he took aim at the Soviet leader.

At a closed party meeting in October 1987, Yeltsin lambasted Gorbachev for backtracking on perestroika and re-creating personality cults. But he also made the attack personal, criticizing Gorbachev for listening too much to his wife, Raisa. That was too much; Yeltsin was expelled from the ruling Politburo.

The episode left Yeltsin with a deep animosity for the party and an enduring rivalry with Gorbachev. “Why hide it?” Yeltsin acknowledged in his memoirs. “The motivations for many of my actions were embedded in our conflict.”

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Into the hospital

Yeltsin’s expulsion wreaked havoc on his health, tossing him into the hospital with severe depression and other maladies. But on the streets of Moscow, it pumped up his popularity. In 1989, Yeltsin ran for a seat in the Congress of People’s Deputies, the Soviet parliament, and won with a resounding 89% of the vote. The following May he was elected chairman of the Russian parliament, and in June 1991, president of the Russian Federation.

At the time, Russia was still just one of 15 republics that made up the Soviet Union, though by far the largest -- home to nearly half the nation’s 290 million people. Yeltsin wasted little time in turning the office of the Russian president into a center of power rivaling that of Gorbachev.

The most critical juncture in Yeltsin’s political career came just two months later. On Aug. 19, 1991, hard-liners dismayed by the changes Gorbachev had wrought announced that they were seizing power. They sent long lines of tanks rumbling into Moscow and held Gorbachev incommunicado at his vacation home on the Black Sea.

Yeltsin rallied behind Gorbachev, gathering a team in the White House, the building in central Moscow that served as Russian government headquarters. They appealed to ordinary citizens to support them, and thousands did, surrounding the building as a kind of human shield.

The plotters had hoped the mere sight of tanks would prevent resistance, but Yeltsin’s gesture of climbing aboard one to decry the coup made a mockery of that premise.

Within three days, the rebellion collapsed.

From that point, momentum shifted toward Yeltsin, who seized it. Gorbachev gave up on preserving the Soviet Union, even as a loose federation. At the beginning of December, Yeltsin and the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine signed an accord that in effect dissolved the Soviet Union.

On Dec. 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned. On Dec. 31, the Soviet Union -- once labeled the “evil empire” by President Reagan -- ceased to exist under international law.

“Overnight, a new Russia -- ‘Boris Yeltsin’s Russia’ -- took the place of the Soviet Union in international politics,” Yeltsin wrote. “We were the heirs to the entire tragic history of the USSR, to say nothing of the legacy of the Russian empire.”

Two days later, Yeltsin launched an economic reform program as bold as it was painful. He wasn’t much of an economist, but he decided to rely on someone who was: a Western-educated liberal named Yegor T. Gaidar.

As acting prime minister, Gaidar chose as a model the “shock therapy” programs that had jump-started the smaller economies of Eastern Europe. The idea, based on prevailing theories in the West, was that as soon as prices were freed, the “market” would start working. Gaidar lifted most price controls on Jan. 2, 1992. Within days, prices had tripled and inflation was racing. By the end of the year, the annual inflation rate had reached a staggering 2,600%.

In theory, Russians wanted economic reform; in practice, it was devastating to their lives and livelihoods. A popular and parliamentary backlash ensued. By the end of the year, Yeltsin was forced to sack Gaidar.

But that wasn’t enough to appease parliament, which locked horns with the president and began talking impeachment.

In March 1993, it voted to restrict Yeltsin’s powers. He declared a state of emergency, granting himself the power to rule by decree, and ordered a referendum on his economic policies that gave him only lukewarm support: 58% said they backed the president and 53% said they approved of his economic program.

Yeltsin signed a decree disbanding parliament that went into effect on Sept. 21, 1993. He wrote later that he was fully aware that what he was doing was unconstitutional.

After 13 days of tense negotiation, the standoff turned violent. Thousands of parliament supporters took up arms, stormed the Moscow mayor’s office and attacked the main television station. Dozens of people were killed and hundreds injured. The next morning, Yeltsin sent tanks and troops against the White House. Shells tore into the facade, and torrents of black smoke poured from its upper floors. By nightfall, the opposition had surrendered and its leaders were in prison. In all, 142 people lost their lives. It was the worst fighting in the Russian capital since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

In the West, leaders generally supported Yeltsin, seeing little alternative. But at home, his reputation suffered badly, especially after he drafted a constitution that gave him near-authoritarian control.

In national elections on Dec. 12, 1993, voters grudgingly approved the constitution -- 54% favored it -- but voted strongly for anti-Yeltsin parties. The new lower house of parliament, the State Duma, was dominated by Communists and ultranationalists.

The new parliament quickly threw mud in Yeltsin’s face, granting amnesty to the leaders of both the August 1991 coup and the parliament uprising. Yeltsin’s tactics had backfired: Instead of forcing parliament into docility, his heavy-handedness meant that for the rest of his tenure, lawmakers would use every scrap of their remaining powers to resist him.

Meanwhile, even a shrunken Russia was threatened with new secessions. Chechnya, a mountainous Islamic republic in the country’s south, had declared independence in 1991. Few took the declaration seriously and the situation smoldered. But in 1994, a group of Yeltsin’s hard-line advisors decided the conflict was getting out of hand. That fall, Yeltsin approved a covert operation designed to topple the Chechen independence leader, Gen. Dzhokar M. Dudayev.

The operation backfired, and the conflict escalated. In December 1994, Yeltsin gave in to advisors who advocated a large-scale military operation to head off a domino reaction by other disgruntled regions.

What they hoped would be a “small, victorious war” turned into what Yeltsin later called a “bloody meat grinder.” Thousands of ill-trained conscripts found themselves in battle against hardened guerrilla fighters. Public outrage rose with the death toll. The president’s health deteriorated; he had a bout of heart trouble in July 1995, followed in October by the first of what would be two serious heart attacks.

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Defeat looked certain

By December, Yeltsin’s physical and political condition was fragile. Presidential elections -- the first since the Soviet collapse -- were just six months away. His ratings, pummeled by the unpopular war, economic hardship and his own leadership style, had fallen to the single digits. Communist leader Gennady A. Zyuganov looked like a sure bet to win the presidency.

Russian “oligarchs” who had made fortunes buying up state enterprises at fire sale prices realized that the return of the Communists to power could spell the end of their fortunes. Just a few months before, they had gained control over the state’s shares in some of the most lucrative oil and metals producers in Russia under a controversial program known as “loans for shares.” The final stage of the program wouldn’t be completed until after the election. They needed Yeltsin to win.

The oligarchs set aside their rivalries, pooled their resources and offered to turn Yeltsin’s campaign around. And they did, building a team of sophisticated image makers who developed media campaigns that were shown relentlessly on the TV networks controlled by oligarchs.

The campaign whiz kids combined Soviet-style propaganda with MTV-style savvy to demonize Zyuganov and present Yeltsin as the best hope for democracy. Under their guidance, the president started stumping and rediscovered some of his populist touch. In the southern city of Rostov-on-Don, he boogied on stage with a pair of leggy song girls.

The media blitz paid off; Yeltsin was reelected in a runoff with 53% of the vote to Zyuganov’s 40%.

But the victory was nearly lost. Just days before the runoff, the president suffered his second serious heart attack, which was not made public until after the election. He remained out of sight for the summer, reappearing only for a brief inauguration ceremony, and in November had a quintuple bypass operation. He returned to the Kremlin briefly in late December but was swiftly felled by a case of pneumonia.

For the rest of his time in office, Yeltsin’s health issues essentially made him a part-time president.

Like Yeltsin’s health, the Chechen war kept getting worse. Rebels staged a blitzkrieg in August 1996 and retook the capital, Grozny. Within weeks, Russia signed a cease-fire agreement that granted Chechnya de facto independence.

The Russian economy also was troubled. The federal government was experiencing a “payments crisis” -- it hadn’t yet learned how to collect taxes, so it was having difficulty paying its bills. Many large enterprises, short of cash as a result, were trading in goods and IOUs, tangling themselves in webs of barter debt. Millions of workers and pensioners went unpaid for months, surviving by growing vegetables.

Yeltsin seemed at a loss as to how to respond, except to bring in new ministers, which he did repeatedly.

But it was too late. In June 1998, the stock market crashed and the value of the ruble began to erode. On Aug. 17, the ruble crashed. In a matter of weeks, prices for many goods doubled. Private banks went bankrupt, robbing millions of their savings yet again. The optimism that had followed Yeltsin’s reelection was shredded.

Yeltsin went through several prime ministers before selecting Putin, a former KGB official who was virtually unknown in the Russian capital.

Putin was immediately thrown to the forefront in early August 1999, when Chechen rebels trying to incite a larger revolt led two incursions into the Russian republic of Dagestan. Russian troops swarmed into Dagestan’s mountains.

In September, just after Putin’s confirmation cleared parliament, apartment houses in Moscow and other cities were bombed in attacks the government blamed on Chechen terrorists. Russia began missile attacks on Chechen territory; on Sept. 30, ground troops moved in. Russia was at war with Chechnya for a second time.

Throughout the fall, fighting escalated -- and so did Putin’s popularity. By December, when parliamentary elections were held, Russian troops were besieging Grozny. A hastily formed pro-Putin faction swept the elections. No longer would parliament oppose the Kremlin’s every move. And Putin was the most popular man in the country.

Yeltsin decided conditions had peaked and it was time for him to make his exit from the political stage. His health was fragile. The economy, buoyed by higher oil prices, was finally showing improvement. His successor was in place. By resigning early, Yeltsin would force early elections, giving Putin a decided advantage over his opponents.

Mindful, as always, of the historical import of his actions, Yeltsin timed his departure for maximum effect. At noon on Dec. 31, 1999, as massive worldwide celebrations of the approaching millennium were beginning, his resignation speech hit the airwaves.

“I am leaving,” he said. “I did everything I could.”

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A mixed legacy

After eight years of Yeltsin as president, Russians on average were marginally better off than they had been during the Soviet period. Most of the economy had been put in private hands. The country had a stock market, a stable currency and other elements of market capitalism.

But important groups of people -- pensioners, teachers, doctors and industrial workers -- had seen their standard of living drop as a small class of insiders enriched itself by legal and illegal means. Perhaps most important, Russians were rattled by the rapidity of the changes, and they craved a stability that never seemed to arrive. Prosperity remained only a promise.

Politically, Yeltsin took control of a country with an oversized and partially appointed parliament and left it with a democratically elected bicameral legislature. He vowed to be the first leader in Russian history not to die in or be forced from office and instead turn over power to an elected successor. He fulfilled that promise.

But he also thwarted democratic procedures when they worked against him, and he did not leave the choice of his successor fully up to the democratic processes he unleashed. Putin’s ascension had the trappings of election, but at heart it was a coronation.

In addition to Naina, his wife of more than 50 years, Yeltsin is survived by his daughters, Yelena Okulova and Tatyana Dyachenko; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

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maura.reynolds@latimes.com

Times staff writer David Holley in Moscow contributed to this report.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Tumultuous times

Highlights of former Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s life and career:

Feb. 1, 1931: Born to peasant parents in the Ural Mountains.

1955: Graduates from Ural Polytechnic Institute and goes to work as a construction engineer.

1956: Marries Naina Girina, an engineer.

1961: Joins Communist Party at relatively late age of 30.

1976: Named senior party official of the Ural Mountains region of Sverdlovsk, making him boss of one of the Soviet Union’s key industrial areas.

1985: Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev names Yeltsin party chief for Moscow.

October 1987: Complains at Communist Party Central Committee meeting about slow pace of economic reforms.

November 1987: Fired as Moscow party chief; hospitalized with heart condition.

Feb. 18, 1988: Expelled from Politburo.

March 26, 1989: Makes stunning comeback in election to Soviet Parliament.

May 1990: Elected chairman of the Russian parliament, in effect making him president of Russia. Later quits Communist Party.

June 1991: Wins Russia’s first popular presidential election.

Aug. 18, 1991: Hard-liners attempt a coup against Gorbachev. Yeltsin defies them while standing on a tank.

Aug. 21, 1991: Coup attempt collapses. Yeltsin emerges as the country’s most powerful and popular politician.

Dec. 8, 1991: Yeltsin, and leaders of Belarus and Ukraine, in effect declare Soviet Union’s demise.

Dec. 25, 1991: Gorbachev resigns and the Soviet Union is dissolved.

January 1992: Yeltsin begins to dismantle 75 years of communist policies by lifting price controls on most goods.

Oct. 3, 1993: Yeltsin declares state of emergency in Moscow after supporters of hard-line parliament overwhelm riot police, seize government buildings.

Dec. 12, 1993: New constitution approved giving Yeltsin sweeping powers and guaranteeing private property, free enterprise and individual rights.

Dec. 11, 1994: Yeltsin sends troops into the republic of Chechnya to quash independence bid.

July 11, 1995: Hospitalized with heart disease. Sets parliamentary elections for December.

October 1995: Yeltsin again hospitalized with heart trouble.

July 3, 1996: Yeltsin wins reelection despite disappearing from public view for final week before the vote. Aides cite a sore throat, though it later proves to be a renewed bout of heart trouble.

Sept. 5, 1996: Yeltsin says he will undergo heart surgery, ending months of secrecy about his health but raising new concerns about his ability to govern.

Nov. 5, 1996: Yeltsin undergoes surgery after temporarily transferring power to Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin.

Jan. 8, 1997: Yeltsin is hospitalized with double pneumonia and remains away from his office for several weeks.

Oct. 27, 1998: Yeltsin cancels or cuts short several foreign trips and enters a rest home to recuperate from what is described as high blood pressure and exhaustion.

Feb. 18, 1999: Parliamentary panel finalizes impeachment charges against Yeltsin.

May 12, 1999: A day before impeachment hearings in parliament, Yeltsin fires Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov and names Interior Minister Sergei V. Stepashin as a replacement.

Aug. 9, 1999: Yeltsin fires Stepashin and names Vladimir V. Putin, the head of the Federal Security Service, acting prime minister. He also says Putin is his preferred successor.

Sept. 30, 1999: Russia sends ground troops into Chechnya, launching Russia’s second war against the breakaway republic.

Dec. 31, 1999: Asking forgiveness for his mistakes, Yeltsin announces his resignation. Putin becomes acting president and is later elected president.

Dec. 8, 2000: The newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda reports that Yeltsin criticized Putin for reintroducing the music to the old Soviet anthem. Yeltsin had discarded the anthem soon after the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Jan. 30, 2001: Yeltsin hospitalized with suspected viral infection.

Sept. 16, 2004: Yeltsin criticizes Putin for ending direct election of governors, which Putin proposed after the bloody end of the school siege in Beslan.

Sept. 7, 2005: Yeltsin undergoes hip surgery after breaking a leg while on vacation in Sardinia.

Jan. 30, 2006: Yeltsin, in a rare interview with the newsweekly Itogi, defends his choice of Putin as his successor, saying that without a “strong hand” the country would disintegrate.

April 23, 2007: Yeltsin dies.

Source: The Associated Press

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Voices

‘We didn’t always agree, but I tried to support him in his work, and each time we spoke, I was struck by two things: his devotion to his country and its people, and his willingness to look at the facts and make a tough decision he thought was in Russia’s long-term interest. Fate gave him a tough time in which to govern, but history will be kind to him because he was courageous and steadfast on the big issues -- peace, freedom and progress.’

Former President Clinton

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‘President Yeltsin was a historic figure who served his country during a period of momentous change. He played a key role as the Soviet Union dissolved, helped lay the foundations of freedom in Russia and became the first democratically elected leader in that country’s history.’

President Bush

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‘He did a great deal to strengthen the democratic underpinnings of the Russian state -- a very great deal.’

-- Eduard A. Shevardnadze

Former Soviet foreign minister and former Georgian president

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‘What set him apart was that he very often defeated his opponents, but he never trampled them. He would knock an opponent off his horse, but he would never destroy him. In his time there were many shortcomings and even crimes, but ... there was never any physical removal of political opponents in Russia, and that was his personal contribution.’

-- Grigory A. Yavlinsky

Liberal Russian politician

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‘A great democrat and politician with whose name a whole era in world history is concerned has departed. Yeltsin’s contribution to the resurrection of the Russian state, his affirmation of the principles of freedom, equality and sovereignty on post-Soviet territory, to a fair construction of the modern world is unique and comparable to the actions of the great historic leaders. Kind memories of Boris Yeltsin will forever remain in our hearts.’

-- Viktor Yushchenko

President of Ukraine

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‘President Yeltsin looked toward Europe and he opened Russia up to the world, and he made a major contribution toward ensuring that between our two countries and between Russia and the European Union, relations of friendship and partnership developed.’

-- Frank-Walter Steinmeier

German foreign minister

Sources: Times Staff and Wire Reports