Independent of the skill of its diplomats and successive ministers, and in spite of its assertive and self confident conceptions of foreign policy, Boris Yeltsin’s Russia has suffered a considerable decline with regards to its position in the international scene. This step backwards is observable in most domains of interaction, namely in the CIS, western Europe, Asia, the US and strategic negotiations. The Russian retreat could certainly be considered a result of an American roll back policy led in the former soviet zone of influence, but it appears to be due primarily to Russian internal weaknesses during the nineteen nineties. – Summary AFRI-2001