Barely. They were in the G8. Even after being kicked out trade kept going as normal, new pipelines were being built, nuclear power plants were being shut down because who needs a fallback?

Saudi Arabia gets full honors on the international stage, despite publicly executing people for criticizing the government or having independent thought, and cutting up a journalist in a consulate abroad.

As long as they kept it to murdering political rivals within the country they would have been fine.

Everybody still does business with PRC, Saudi Arabia, etc

And that would just be a step too far.

Eh. Through the history of the 90s, it looked like they might have a shot at establishing a free and stable democracy.

Then privatization and mishandled foreign aid created their oligarchs, quality of life fell through the floor in basically all the post-Soviet states, people got mad, tired, and scared, Putin stepped in to "stabilize the situation"— Then the politicians and journalists started dying, crazy siloviks and vatniks fully captured what was left of their political institutions I guess, and now they're doing a lot of evil murder and various interesting atrocities.

There might have been/probably were underlying cultural factors that made it impossible for Russia to ever stabilize as a "normal" country at that point. But those are hard to see from an outside perspective, and I guess they're probably pretty hard to see from inside as well.

why the anti-eu shit? Russian dick sounds tasty to you or what?

and which of these poorer countries do you think id worse off since joining the EU? other than maybe Hungary but that has nothing to do with the EU, lol

We're literally pumping money into our poorer members to get them up to speed

Please let us know when you find out, comrade.

There is still far too many people hurt by the Cold War or its fallout, which many Westerners forget lead to the deaths of millions, for any partnership with Russia to be anything other than tenuous.

There were a few years of hope of a genuine partnership after the wall fell. That hope remained but arguably became delusional once Putin took charge.

It's worth reading the actual Times article that they ran with that cover.

https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,760539,00.html

Führer of the German people, Commander-in-Chief of the German Army, Navy & Air Force, Chancellor of the Third Reich, Herr Hitler reaped on that day at Munich the harvest of an audacious, defiant, ruthless foreign policy he had pursued for five and a half years. He had torn the Treaty of Versailles to shreds. He had rearmed Germany to the teeth— or as close to the teeth as he was able. He had stolen Austria before the eyes of a horrified and apparently impotent world.

It's not complimentary. Time's Man of the Year is based on influence. It's not saying that influence is good.

Hitler made the cover of time as a monster, not because he was "great".

Spain kept it going internally for decades.

Evil is uncontainable. If you accept bribe money, corruption will haunt your country.

I mean you're telling everyone that your country is superior to all others then it's just logical that you see others as mere support for your country and even entitled to it.

And if the world had stopped immediately after the cold war ended this would be a valid statement.

Unfortunately there were 30+ intervening years where the US and other countries did invest in Russia. Stop acting like that wasn't a thing, we've spent the last year plus trying to drag that shit out of russia since they invaded Ukraine.

Oh look, the tankies are here

Russia never applied to join NATO.