> We had a narrow window circa 1999-2007 where we could have integrated an Authoritarian Russia into a security and economic framework that would put China in a vulnerable strategic position.
Top Russian diplomats, starting with some of the former foreign ministers themselves, maintain that the disintegration of Russian democracy is the fault of the former KGB and military power structures, which enjoyed privileged positions in the Soviet system. They were sidelined when the USSR fell apart, but by the mid-1990s, had crawled back and consolidated enough power to begin wiping out all other competition, from political parties to the free press.
If any blame lies with external actors, they say, it is for failing to support and pressure Russia enough to develop into a modern European state. Instead, the US and the EU continued to butter the KGB-military faction well into the 2010s, doing their best to ignore war crimes, human rights abuses, attacks on political freedoms, the suppression of political rights, and the outright murder of political opponents.
There was no "narrow window" in 1999-2007. The window for keeping Russia on a path toward becoming a normal European state closed around 1995. 1999 marks the year Putin rose to the highest levels of government, and by that point the outcome was pretty much decided. By spring 2000, Putin had openly raided and taken over NTV, the last major independent television channel in Russia. In 2002, the powers of the security services were expanded and notorious "extremism" laws were adopted, which have been used to suppress everything from opposition parties to NGOs. In 2003, Putin took over oil and gas company Yukos and arrested and imprisoned its owner, the richest man in Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
By the end of 2003, Russia had no independent national media, no effective parliamentary opposition, and instead had laws enabling repression under legal cover and security services embedded in political governance. Property rights, even for the richest and most influential people in the country, had become conditional on loyalty to Putin.
Russian democrats, who had lost their influence by the mid-1990s, could have become partners of the US and EU, but the KGB-military elite - never. Even suggesting this signals an absolute lack of understanding of who they are and where they come from. For them, challenging the US and expanding Russia through coercion and war to the full territorial extent of the former Eastern Bloc is the endgame. They don't give two shits about China. They want a return to the privileged heyday of the KGB-military elites in the 1970s, when Europe was divided by the Iron Curtain and the USSR was believed to be an equal to the US. This is the "normal state of the world" of his youth that Putin desperately wants to return to.
Antagonism toward the US lies at their very core, and no amount of buttering will change that. The possibility of cooperation is merely an illusion they sell you to blind you to the next move they make against you.