RUSSIAN SECURITY POLICY OPTIONS AND THEIR PRICE

The foreign and security policies of the Russian Federation are still passing through a period of transition and, consequently, are characte rised by considerable uncertainty concerning the course they will take . Several schools of thought are trying to map out perspectives and co ncepts. They tend to neglect the central question of which of the post ulated demands Russia can in fact afford, i.e. what implications the r ealisation of one or the other concept would have for the country's ec onomic development. Roland Goetz, an academic assistant at the Federal Institute for East European and International Studies, analyses these problems in the following article.