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Six months after Moscow froze relations with NATO over the alliance's bombing of Yugoslavia, the former Cold War foes are quietly resuming contacts but the road to restoring full ties is proving long and hard.
Russia's military representative to NATO came to Brussels this month for his first talks at alliance headquarters since ties were frozen on March 24 and NATO's military contact officer, expelled from Moscow, visited the city last week.
These tentative contacts, restricted to discussion of joint peacekeeping operations in Kosovo, have been possible because officials on both sides acknowledge that the alternative to cooperation is too unpleasant to contemplate.
But ties remain formally frozen, and a major improvement is all but ruled out until Russia completes parliamentary and presidential elections in the next nine months.
Most Russian politicians regard NATO-bashing as a vote-winner and courting the alliance as political suicide.
"The body politic will not alter its anti-NATO position before the State Duma (parliament) election and there will probably be no big progress before the presidential election due next summer," a NATO source said.
"It has become politically correct in Moscow to be anti-NATO and no one can openly go against it. Communists and nationalists see NATO as an enemy and the democrats' influence has declined."
A breakthrough is also widely considered unlikely as long as Colonel-General Viktor Zavarzin is Russia's military representative to NATO. He caught the West off guard by leading Russian peacekeepers from Bosnia into Kosovo in June a few hours before NATO troops reached the Yugoslav province.
"I see nothing changing as long as Zavarzin is around. He is not one of the people looking forward," said a Russian source.
UNFULFILLED DREAM OF PARTNERSHIP
Russia and NATO are now a long way from achieving the new partnership which they set out in the Founding Act signed by President Boris Yeltsin and the alliance in Paris in 1997.
That agreement was designed to end mistrust over NATO's plans to admit new members including former communist-ruled countries of eastern Europe that were once in the Warsaw Pact.
But mistrust lingers over NATO enlargement, especially over the prospect of former Soviet republics joining the alliance, and NATO's bombing of Russia's Slav brethren in Yugoslavia produced the fiercest anti-Western rhetoric since the Cold War.
"I hear people say things won't ever again be what they were before the Kosovo crisis. I think that's true. It had a decisive impact on thinking and emotions," another NATO source said.
"Because of Kosovo, quite a lot of the people in Russia who were in favor of cooperation with NATO have lost influence, and the people who persuaded President Yeltsin to freeze ties would now have problems explaining why they should be unfrozen."
Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, who should be in a position to influence Yeltsin on foreign policy, is among those. The usually soft-spoken and urbane minister unleashed some of the harshest criticism of NATO in March in apparent efforts to keep his job, and is not considered part of Yeltsin's close circle.
OPTIMISM MIXES WITH PESSIMISM
Despite the gloomy signs in relations, officials at NATO also see some encouraging signs.
"There are excellent relations between Russian and NATO soldiers on the ground in peacekeeping, and there is quite a strong lobby in the Russian Defense Ministry which thinks it's a great idea to cooperate with NATO," one source said.
He said the Russians were playing a "political game".
"They refuse to be seen holding meetings with NATO, but are holding seminars and meetings with individual NATO member states. We must look at ways to develop this," he said.
Moscow's financial problems, its loss of superpower status, its fear of isolation and the belief that talking to NATO gives it a better chance of influencing the alliance's decisions on enlargement, provide reasons for it to develop the relationship.
For its part, NATO clearly prefers cooperation with Russia to confrontation with an unpredictable and dangerous rival.
NATO officials hope the parliamentary election in December will produce a State Duma more open to cooperation with the alliance and that the example shown by the peacekeepers on the ground in Kosovo will have an effect on the upper ranks.