Obama and the Russians: Moving on to the 'post-reset'

"I was recently in Moscow talking to various people in government and outside the government who work in the foreign policy world and they certainly have been hoping that Obama would win because from their point of view he is the devil they know," Charles Grant, director of the CER in London, says. "They don't like Obama that much - they have a lot of problems with him in certain areas like his plans for missile defence - but they know what he stands for and, as one member of the Russian Duma said to me, he understands we are living in a multipolar world."

Now the Kremlin has its wish, but that doesn't mean a return to the relatively warm relations of the "reset" of 2009 and 2010 is likely in the cards. "The reset that Obama engineered with President Dmitry Medvedev has really come to an end," Grant says. "Since Putin became president for a third term, that sort of close rapprochement between Washington and Moscow has sort of evaporated, so I think there is more coolness than there was [before], even with Obama's victory."

...Analyst Grant notes that US-Russian relations are determined as much by who is in the Kremlin as they are by who is in the White House, and that Putin has turned a particularly enigmatic face to the United States in recent months. "There is a kind of contradiction in Putin's attitude towards America," Grant says. "On the one hand, when he met Obama at the G20 in Mexico, I'm told he was very constructive and said he wanted to work with Obama. And certainly in meetings I've had with Russian leaders recently, they have been quiet calm and sober on the United States rather than rhetorically aggressive. On the other hand, you have the public rhetoric out of the Russian media, which is strongly anti-American."