Abstract

During the last quarter of a century a wide and stimulating debate around the foreign policy of the Russian Federation has involved historians and IR specialists, and has been further fuelled by the Russian-Ukrainian conflict which broke out in 2014 and culminated in the present war. This article, mainly devoted to the scientific literature in English, focuses on some significant aspects of this debate: points of difference and agreement among realist, liberal and constructivist approaches; Russia’s return to Great Power politics; the various periodization criteria adopted by scholars; the usefulness of imperial categories to describe Russia’s attitude on the international scene in the 21st century; the geopolitical vectors of Russian foreign policy past and present