The circus of American and European diplomats in Moscow loved Dmitri Trenin while he was on their side. Trenin was a former colonel in a Soviet intelligence agency. He became known in the early 2000s for writing books that argued Russia, diminished after the Cold War, should get friendly with the West by joining Nato and the European Union. He was a pro-West Russian, and it earned him the directorship of the Moscow branch of a rich American think tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Trenin built contacts in the Kremlin, wrote for the New York Times, and was in the phone book of every foreign ambassador in the Russian capital. He was telling westerners what they wanted to hear. ‘A Russian who is ahead of his time and the vast majority of his countrymen’, is how a lofty American book reviewer described him in 2001.
Today, Trenin’s hope that his country will become part of the West is finished.
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