"It's evidence that Europe is concluding bilateral deals with Ukraine that undermine Russia's interests." "This agreement is Exhibit A in Moscow's collection ," says Trenin. Moscow has reacted angrily to Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko's attempts in recent years to gain NATO membership and to a recent agreement in March under which the European Union would help modernize Ukraine's aging gas-transport system. Any move by the West towards the former Soviet republics is seen as damaging Russia's interests." "Their central foreign policy goal is to create a power center around Russia.
"The Russian leadership is very apprehensive about what it sees as Western moves designed to tear Ukraine away from Russia," says Dmitry Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, an independent think tank in Moscow. Putin's words are seen as the latest in an ongoing volley of pointed warnings to the West not to meddle in Ukraine, which has such close historical and cultural ties to Russia that the Kremlin considers the country firmly within its sphere of interests. "He says that no one should be allowed to interfere in relations between us they have always been the business of Russia itself." ( See TIME's Person of the Year: Vladimir Putin.) "He has a discussion there about Big Russia and Little Russia Ukraine," Russian news wires quoted Putin as saying after laying a wreath in Moscow at the grave of Denikin, who is now portrayed as a Russian patriot. ( See TIME's photos of last year's war in Georgia.) But on Sunday he gave Russian journalists an unexpected reading tip: the diaries of Anton Denikin, a commander in the White Army, which fought the Bolsheviks after the revolution in 1917.
Follow Putin, Russia's Prime Minister and former President, is not renowned for his love of literature.
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