Wow. Without fanfare, a comprehensive archive of White House documents covering nearly all of Bill Clinton’s meetings and phone calls with Boris Yeltsin from 1993-1999 has been declassified and is now online. clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/575… 1/ 
These previously close-hold memcons, talking points, discussion papers, and diplomatic messages reveal how high-level diplomacy and the national security bureaucracy actually worked at key moments in history. 2/
The roughly 1,000 pages of documents, incl internal NSC/State Dept memos, cover a great many issues that are still front and center in US-Russian relations (Ukraine, regional conflicts, the foibles and shenanigans of Russian oligarchs, nuclear weapons, the Middle East). 3/
The archive also contains many memorable diplomatic cables from the US Embassy in Moscow, incl readouts of meetings with key players in 1990s-era Russian politics and policymaking. 4/
There are also some rather sordid moments that were very jarring to folks on the inside– eg the time during the Kosovo crisis that an inebriated Yeltsin proposed a secret 1-on-1 meeting with Clinton on a submarine (!) 5/
A few items are missing, but readers can see how Yeltsin secretly told Clinton how Putin became his handpicked successor--and just how concerned U.S. officials were about Putin’s ascendancy, the rollback of post-1991 reforms and the recentralization of power in the Kremlin. 6/
This fascinating essay by @JimGoldgeier, who has produced by far the best scholarship out there on this period in US-Russian relations, digs deeply into the conversations. tnsr.org/2018/08/bill-a… 7/
Goldgeier explains that, regardless of how incredibly lopsided the power differential was at that time, it’s still remarkable how fixated the Kremlin was even then on being seen as America’s equal on the world stage. 8/
That kind of request was an easy enough thing for Washington to satisfy in places like the UN, the G8, and NATO-Russia channels. Even in that era of generally cooperative relations, US disagreements w Moscow on issues like missile defense were quite intense. 9/
Reading these documents, it’s easy to see how the various grievances and narratives, real and imagined, that dominate current Kremlin thinking took hold. But for all the Kremlin's myth-making, there’s little indication of any U.S. desire to humiliate or marginalize Russia. END/
Addendum: link to part 1 of the Clinton-Yeltsin memcon archive clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/575… and a separate mountain of declassified Russia materials from the Clinton Library clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/browse?t…
