With its political disarray over and its economy on the rise, Russia, which hosts the G8 summit this week, is ditching its post-Soviet inferiority complex and shaping a new foreign policy.

“We don’t think we were defeated in the Cold War,” President Vladimir Putin’s aide Vladislav Surkov, said. “We believe we beat our own totalitarian regime.”

Gone are the days when first post-Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, vowed Moscow’s adherence to the “community of world democracies”.

Instead, Russia is shaping a new foreign policy line. Putin now tells his diplomats to revive Russia’s independent global role and promote its own interests rather than tail any international camp.

“We should not only take part in solving issues of a global agenda, but also make a solid contribution to forming it,” he told a recent conference of Russia’s ambassadors.

Apart from steady economic growth on the back of high energy prices, Russia’s ambitions are pinned to the emergence of new strong global players, like China and India, which Moscow sees as a sign of a shifting international balance of powers.

Russia has stepped up strategic ties with China, once a foe in their clash for supremacy in the communist world.

The Shanghai Security Organisation, dominated by the two, now claims to have a stability role in the vast region including resource-rich, but restive ex-Soviet Central Asia.

Putin has made clear that when leaders of eight industrial nations, the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Japan, Italy and Canada, meet in St. Petersburg this week, Russia intends to position itself as a bridge between the West and the rising South.

“Everyone favours Russia’s active role in the club because no one wants the G8 to become a gathering of fat cats,” he said in January when he took over the G8 chairmanship.

Some elements of Russia’s new diplomacy have raised eyebrows in the West.

Russia is resisting Western pressure to punish Iran, which is suspected of working on its own nuclear weapons, and North Korea, which says it has already got one.

It hosted Hamas leaders in March despite calls by Israel and the United States to isolate the radical Palestinian movement which vows to destroy the Jewish state.

Putin has rejected any suggestions that Russia was pulling together a new camp to confront the West.

But Russian officials do not hide their disenchantment with the West, which in Moscow’s eyes has failed to match its political progress, including support in the war on terror, with appropriate economic incentives like access to Western markets.

Russia also accuses the United States and Europe, which supported pro-Western revolutions in ex-Soviet Ukraine and Georgia, of poaching in its traditional sphere of influence.

Although Russia has lost most of its Soviet-era military might and allies, the growing international demand for energy resources has given it a new strong diplomatic weapon.

A brief disruption of gas supply in the middle of a price row with Ukraine, which many in the West saw as a punishment for Kiev’s new pro-Western stance, scared Europe in January.

However, Putin has made clear he does not want disagreements with the West to grow into new confrontations and he is sure to use the G8 summit to show he wants to keep Russia in the pack of mainstream global players.

“Our aim is to make it so that after the summit other G8 leaders acknowledge that Russia shares G8 values although it will not submit to a common stand among partners if it believes they are wrong,” his pointman Igor Shuvalov said. — Reuters