Leon Aron at the American Enterprise Institute has a new brief out on Russia following the Summit. Here's just one section from the report on the use of anti-American propaganda by the Kremlin.The Kremlin's valiant defense of Russia against alleged plots from the outside evolved into one of the key legitimizing tools of the regime, and deafening and primitive anti-American propaganda became the staple of the state-owned or state-controlled national media. In the words of a Russian observer, the United States is "used as a bogeyman for domestic political purposes."[16] Presiding over the May 2007 military parade to mark the sixty-second anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War (World War II), Putin likened the unnamed perpetrators of "new threats" to Russia to the Third Reich because of "the same desire to impose diktat on the world."[17] Everyone in Moscow that day understood the evildoer to be the United States.
Since then, the United States has been alleged by Kremlin-directed propaganda to be behind virtually all of Russia's political, diplomatic, military, and economic setbacks: from the demise of the Soviet Union and the Chechen struggle for independence in the 1990s to the Georgian and Ukrainian "color" revolutions of 2003 and 2004, and Russia's current economic crisis, which Medvedev declared in June 2008 to be the fault of America's "aggressive financial policies."[18] The Russo-Georgian war in August of last year, too, was blamed on the United States. In Putin's words, the United States "deliberately created this conflict to create a competitive advantage for one of the candidates for the U.S. presidency" (i.e., Senator John McCain) and to help solve "the problems in the [U.S.] economy," including "financial problems" and the "mortgage crisis."[19] Every one of these canards was buttressed by prime time "documentaries" on national television channels, including one about the U.S. government engineering the 9/11 attacks to promote its domestic and foreign policy objectives and one about the CIA's plot to dislodge the present Russian regime through an "Orange-style revolution."[20]
It is a foreign policy arising from this domestic context that the "reset button" pressed by the White House seeks to mesh successfully with the U.S. strategic agenda. Of course, nothing in the evolutions of postrevolutionary states like Russia is automatic. For instance, to take the most obvious case of discontinuity, Russia's deepening economic crisis may bring about abrupt domestic policy shifts, which, in turn, are almost certain to prompt adjustments in foreign policy, making it more accommodating--or still more confrontational and unyielding.[21] At the moment, however, this evolution and this context are our best guide to gauging Russia's response to the "button agenda."
Russians know from the 1990s that the US government cares not how, or even whether, Russians live, only that their government accept Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Central Asia as a US sphere of influence and to submit Russia to looting. The "reset" hasn't changed anything but the rhetoric, which is why Russians aren't impressed.