Kozyrev's pro-Western and liberal foreign policy fell out of favor because of NATO expansion that began from 1995, and he was replaced by Yevgeny Primakov in early 1996, who represented Russian "security state" interests.
[10] Seizing the opportunity opened by Gorbachev's glasnost in summer 1989, Kozyrev wrote an article repudiating the Leninist concept of the "international class struggle", the very essence of Leninism.
[11] Firstly published in the Soviet press, the article was reproduced in The Washington Post and other major news sources all over the world,[12] making him known as a political figure.
After the failed Soviet coup attempt of 1991, he found himself in president Boris Yeltsin's team of young reformers, which included Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais, and shared their Western liberal-democratic ideals.
He became Russian foreign minister at the age of 39 and gained and kept the confidence of Boris Yeltsin as Russia became an independent state and, in many ways, the successor to the Soviet Union.
He wrote in his 2019 memoir: "The signed document establishing the Commonwealth of Independent States was in effect a death sentence for the Soviet Union, the largest country on earth and our fatherland.
[16] According to Dmitri Simes, in the spring of 1992 Kozyrev told former U.S. president Richard Nixon during a visit to Moscow that he defined Russian national interests as "universal human values."
After their conversation, Nixon and Simes both thought that Kozyrev risked weakening his own position in Russian politics if he followed the United States on all foreign policy questions.
He stunned the foreign ministers of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) and the Russian delegation alike with a speech that echoed many of the positions of the nationalist opposition in Russia, and seemed to threaten a return to anti-Western policies.
[18][19][20][21] He had reason to worry, for one month earlier Pravda had reported that he was "splitting into pieces the former socialist camp … Kozyrev in effect is paving the way for the expansion of a new American empire."
Others accused the "young reformers" in the Gaidar government of breaking "historical" ties with Warsaw Pact partners and Kozyrev of abandoning the "traditional" zone of Russian interests thanks to his obsession with a pro-Western foreign policy.
"[22] At the UN General Assembly Kozyrev declared in 1993, by the time of the Sukhumi massacre of the War in Abkhazia (1992–93): "Russia realizes that no international organization or group of states can replace our peacekeeping efforts in this specific post-Soviet space.
[24] There is still some question as to his role in the confusion of Yeltsin over the German re-unification and Helsinki Final Act and ensuing Partnership for Peace push for NATO expansion.
[27] In the summer of 1995 Kozyrev wrote in Foreign Policy that "Western politicians, again Americans in particular, have increasingly tended to substitute a strategy of a rapid expansion of NATO without its fundamental transformation for partnership between the alliance and Eastern Europe, including Russia.
[29] In October 1991 Vice President Alexander Rutskoi went to Kyiv to negotiate the price of Russian natural gas exports to Ukraine, and through Ukrainian territory to Europe.
The Ukrainians turned for help to the United States, but it sought to aggregate Soviet nuclear weapons in the hands of Moscow and to occupy ex-Soviet scientists with the Nunn–Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction programme.
[22][27] In the December 1993 elections, Kozyrev ran for a seat in the lower house, the State Duma, as a candidate on the list of the liberal Russia's Choice bloc in the Murmansk region.
[36] Kozyrev, who is convinced that the "authoritarian, anti-Western system Mr. Putin has re-imposed will not prevail", moved to the US in 2010,[37] and has lived at least since 2015 in Miami,[35] from where he published in 2019 a memoir of his time at the centre of Yeltsinian intrigue,[38][37] The Firebird: The Elusive Fate of Russian Democracy (Foreword by Michael McFaul.
"[26] In his memoir Kozyrev "complains that the U.S. aggressively pushed Russia out of its own traditional markets, (i.e. the Warsaw Pact countries) leaving Moscow to nurse its wounds and sell weapons and technology to rogue regimes.
"[7] In an audience at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy in 2020 Kozyrev said Obama's response to the 2014 Crimean status referendum and subsequent Annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation was "feeble".
He observes sadly that Anton Troianovski wrote that "The history of mass execution and political imprisonment in the Soviet era, and the denunciation of fellow citizens encouraged by the state… now looms over Russia's deepening… repression," and finds the two 20th-century systems to have one thread in common: totalitarianism.
Sergey Radchenko finds Kozyrev's 2019 memoir to offer "fascinating insights into Moscow's foreign policy at a time when everything seemed possible, including, perhaps, a prosperous, democratic Russia that was anchored in the West.