Europe: Russian Rumblings; Forget an ever-closer union. The EU's giant neighbor is growing less and less interested in joining hands.

Byline: Stefan Theil (With Frank Brown in Moscow)

European diplomats called it "the Polish path." In this rosy view, Russia would--like Poland and other post-communist countries before it--proceed down a slow but steady path of democratization and free-market reform. Never mind George W. Bush's talk of forging a special U.S.-Russian relationship; an upwardly mobile Russia would inevitably gravitate into the European Union's orbit, irresistibly attracted by the EU's geographical proximity, its 10 trillion euros market and common bonds of history and culture. One fine day, it seemed, Russia might even become a member.

These days the view from EU capitals couldn't be more different. As Europe sees it, President Vladimir Putin is taking Russia down a very un-European track by sharply curtailing democratic rights. The economy and media are coming more and more under state control. The bloody military campaign in Chechnya--with some 150,000 civilians dead--is deeply offensive to soft-power Europe. The idea that Russia is becoming more and more European today seems bizarre. The new conventional wisdom: Europe stays Europe, Russia stays Russia, and never the twain shall meet.

The estrangement runs deep, is mutual--and has in recent weeks come to a head. Two weeks ago Putin unexpectedly called off a planned summit with EU leaders in The Hague after clashes over human rights and security issues became too fundamental for even diplomatic verbiage to paper over. The summit has now been rescheduled for this week, but diplomats say bluntly that the quarrel won't be resolved. Europe has put on hold negotiations for a promised free-trade agreement with Russia. Moscow, in turn, is threatening to boycott the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, accusing the EU-dominated group of anti-Russian bias. If the hope was once for increased integration, Russian Duma member Vladimir Ryzhkov tells NEWSWEEK, today's standoff is more reminiscent of the ugly diplomatic battles of the cold war. Says Katinka Barysch, Russia expert at London's Centre for European Reform: "Relations between Europe and Russia have broken down."

What happened? As little as two years ago, the future still looked bright. In 2002 Russia had just gotten its long-sought voice in the NATO military alliance, which assured Moscow that future security decisions in Europe would not be made without a Russian say. To prepare for the creation of a gigantic free-trade zone from the Atlantic to the Bering Strait, Brussels and Moscow were busy implementing a 1997 "partnership agreement" committing Russia to start aligning its laws and trading standards with the EU's. Putin was in high regard in Western capitals, seen not as a crypto-Soviet autocrat but as a leader who could restore badly needed order after the chaotic reign of Boris Yeltsin. Amid the transatlantic row over Iraq, there was even talk of a Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis, an ever-closer alliance driven by mutual distrust of American unilateralism.

Yet all these overtures ignored the extent to which Europe and Russia lived, then and now, on different political planets. The EU is the ultimate soft power, its foreign-policy goal the creeping transformation of neighboring countries into images of itself--through either membership or close association. The reward is economic integration, collective stability and access to its wealthy market. For most of the EU's neighbors, that deal has proved irresistible. To Russians it is anathema. Unwilling to subject itself to Brussels's rules, institutions and collective decision making, Russia prefers to see itself as a great power on par with China and the United States. "There is a basic discrepancy in our values," says Sergei Karaganov, head of Moscow's Council on Foreign and Defense Policy.

More than any other event, EU enlargement this May intensified these differences. With the accession of 10 new members, including the three formerly Soviet Baltic republics and five other ex-communist states, not only is the EU now on Russia's western doorstep. With Bulgaria and Romania on target to join in 2007--and Turkey a likely candidate--the EU is encroaching on southern Russia and the Caucasus as well. All of a sudden, EU-Russian relations have become a kind of strategic game, feeding Moscow's deja vu of foreign "encirclement" ...