Moscow is facing a daunting expansion of NATO to Russia's borders with equanimity, after recognizing the alliance as a dying force that has little bearing on its relations with Europe or the United States.
This pragmatic approach befits Vladimir Putin -- a Russian president who abandoned the die-hard Soviet-style foreign policy of his predecessor Boris Yeltsin which often seemed to have less substance than bravado.
Top Moscow officials admit the November 21-22 NATO summit in Prague will be bruising for Russia's prestige. The three Baltic states and several former Warsaw Pact nations are likely to be offered admission. But many here also say the Prague summit is much less a slap in the face than an inconvenience.
"Everyone says NATO is so important -- but no one seems to be able to explain why," Vladimir Lukin, the deputy speaker of Russia's lower house of parliament and a former ambassador to Washington, told AFP.
"Relations between Russia and the United States, and Russia and Europe, have
developed very rapidly on their own terms in recent times," Lukin said.
"The problem of NATO is no longer an issue (for Russia). The more NATO expands, the more useless it becomes."
Russian officials point to the US-led campaign to oust the Taliban in Afghanistan and its planned campaign in Iraq to demonstrate how Washington's
consistent post-Cold War policy has been to make the Atlantic Alliance irrelevant as the bloc expands.
"The Americans were the first to understand that NATO is no longer serious,"
Konstantin Kosachyov, deputy head of the Duma's foreign affairs committee, told AFP.
"Before September 11, they were very careful about who made it in (to NATO).
Now, they let in everyone," he said.
"This means the Americans have abandoned it. NATO is no longer a military organization. It has not been used in Afghanistan, and it will not be used in Iraq."
NATO expansion -- along with US troop movements in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia and in Georgia in the volatile Caucasus -- has generally been viewed as Putin's concession for good economic relations with
the United States.
Some here argue those good relations never came, but Putin will still host US President George W. Bush at a former imperial summer mansion in northwestern
Russia -- near the NATO border -- just a few days after the alliance expands.
The Russian leader is unlikely to have agreed to the talks with Bush if he had taken expansion to heart, analysts here say.
"We hope that mutual military restraint and mutual confidence will serve as a basis for future relations between Russia and NATO," Putin said earlier this
month in Brussels after talks with NATO chief George Robertson.
The general consensus among Western observers in Moscow however has been that Putin exercises only limited authority over his military -- much of its senior command a Soviet remnant taught to treat NATO with caution at best.
And the Russian military's response to the improvement in Russia-NATO ties has been unenthusiastic. One top commander seemed at a loss when asked to explain the new relationship.
"Right now, we are speaking to NATO like equals," Anatoly Kvashnin, head of the Russian general chief of staff, told reporters.
But one of Kvashnin's phrases spoken moments later seemed to recognize that his was wishful thinking.
"We want to be listened to -- and treated as equal partners" by NATO, Kvashnin said in an apparent contradiction to his earlier statement.
One of Kvashnin's main worries is a Soviet-era agreement called the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE). This limits the number of tanks and other conventional weapons that can be stationed by Moscow and Western forces across the eastern and southern edges of Europe that divide it with former Soviet states.
To Russia's chagrin, the Baltic states have so far refused to accept the agreement.
This means the three republics could station more NATO tanks and other weapons near Russia than are positioned -- legally -- on the other side of the frontline.
While maintaining their customary caution, some Russians politicians say this is just Cold War talk, and US officials seem to agree.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell remarked during a May Russia-NATO summit in Italy that the two sides were heading to Prague "in a great deal more calm an atmosphere than might have been expected."