Ambassador James F. Collins - The Ambassadorial Series: Deans of U.S. - Russia Relations Interview (Part 1)

"Yeltsin was in a bit of a corner in all of this. I think he himself felt it was an absolute disaster to use a military option against Serbia. Now, were we prepared for this. Were the Americans, I think, sensitive enough to what this was going to mean? No, they weren't. I'm not sure we at the embassy even understood how deeply the reaction was going to go or how effective the people who were Yeltsin's critics were going to be in using what we did in Serbia against him and against the, if you will, the Westerners, but they were and it put them on the defensive and it made it very difficult for the Yeltsin team for quite some time." - Ambassador James F. Collins
The Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies at the Middlebury Institute introduces The Ambassadorial Series: Deans of U.S. - Russia Diplomacy, Part Two of The Ambassadorial Series. Part Two consists of six plus hours of conversations with Ambassadors Jack F. Matlock, Thomas R. Pickering, and James F. Collins about crucial events and developments in U.S.-Russia relations. Focusing on the 1990s – from the disintegration of the USSR to President Putin's ascent to Russia’s highest office a decade later, Part Two, hosted by Dr. Hanna Notte, continues to offer firsthand accounts and analyses of the cataclysmic changes that transformed Russian politics and society.