The United States and Russia maintain strategic foreign relations since the establishment in 1991, a continuation of the relationship the United States has had with various Russian governments since 1803. While both nations have shared interests in nuclear safety and security, non-proliferation, counterterrorism, and space exploration, their relationship has been shown through a mixture of cooperation, competition, and hostility, with both countries considering one another foreign adversaries for much of their relationship. Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, the US has pursued normalization and the bettering of relations, largely centered around the resolution of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of the Cold War, the relationship was generally warm under Russian president Boris Yeltsin (1991–99). In the early years of Yeltsin's presidency, the United States and Russia established a cooperative relationship and worked closely together to address global issues such as arms control, counterterrorism, and the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina. During Yeltsin's second term, United States–Russia relations became more strained. The NATO intervention in Yugoslavia, in particular, the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo, was strongly opposed by Yeltsin. Although the Soviet Union had been strongly opposed by the Titovian flavour of independence, Yeltsin saw it as an infringement on Russia's latter-day sphere of influence. Yeltsin also criticized NATO's expansion into Eastern Europe, which he saw as a threat to Russia's security.
After Vladimir Putin became President of Russia in 2000, he initially sought to improve relations with the United States. The two countries cooperated on issues such as counterterrorism and arms control. Putin worked closely with United States president George W. Bush on the war in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks. Following Putin's re-election to the Russian presidency in 2012, relations between the two countries were significantly strained due to Russia's annexation of Crimea and the Russian military intervention in Ukraine. Deterioration continued with the Russian military intervention in the Syrian civil war.
Relations further deteriorated during the presidency of Joe Biden following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. International sanctions imposed since 2014 were significantly expanded by the U.S. and its allies, including several state-owned banks and oligarchs. During the second presidency of Donald Trump, the United States has attempted to normalize relations with Russia and has sided with Russia in the United Nations, voting against a resolution to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2025, in a dramatic departure from the long-standing American position on humanitarian issues since 2014. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has also ordered the suspension of offensive cyber operations against Russia. Despite this, relations between the two countries are still poor due to continuation of the war in Ukraine, and further due to the outbreak of the Iran war in 2026.
Background
United States and the Russian Empire
There was little trade or migration before the late 19th century. Formal diplomatic ties were established in 1809. During the American Civil War, Russia supported the Union, largely because it believed that the U.S. served as a counterbalance to its geopolitical rival, the United Kingdom. In 1863, the Russian Navy's Baltic and Pacific fleets wintered in the American ports of New York and San Francisco, respectively.Norman E. Saul, Richard D. McKinzie. Russian-American Dialogue on Cultural Relations, 1776–1914 p 95. .
Russia operated a small fur-trade operations in Alaska, coupled with missionaries to the natives. By 1861, the project had lost money, threatened to antagonize the Americans, and could not be defended from Britain. It proved practically impossible to entice Russians to permanently migrate to Alaska; only a few hundred were there in 1867. In the Alaska Purchase of 1867, the land was sold to the United States for $7.2 million.James R. Gibson, "Why the Russians Sold Alaska." Wilson Quarterly 3.3 (1979): 179–188 online.Thomas A. Bailey, "Why the United States Purchased Alaska." Pacific Historical Review 3.1 (1934): 39–49
The Russian administrators and military left Alaska, but some missionaries stayed on to minister to the many natives who converted to the Russian Orthodox faith.Ronald Jensen, The Alaska Purchase and Russian-American Relations (1975)
After 1880, repeated anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia alienated American elite and public opinion. In 1903, the Kishinev pogrom killed 47 Jews, injured 400, and left 10,000 homeless and dependent on relief. American Jews began large-scale organized financial help and assisted in emigration.Philip Ernest Schoenberg, "The American Reaction to the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903." American Jewish Historical Quarterly 63.3 (1974): 262–283.
The Treaty of Portsmouth (1905), brokered by United States president Theodore Roosevelt, ended the Russo-Japanese War.See "Treaty of Portsmouth"
During World War I, the United States declaration of war on Germany (1917) came after Nicholas II had abdicated as a result of the February Revolution. When the tsar was still in power, many Americans deplored fighting a war with him as an ally. With him gone, the Wilson administration used the new provisional government to describe how the democratic nations were fighting against autocratic old empires of Germany and Austria-Hungary. During the war, the American Expeditionary Forces were just starting to see battle when the October Revolution happened in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government and removed Russia from the war.
Before the armistice in November 1918, the Americans had helped the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War with the Polar Bear Expedition and the American Expeditionary Force Siberia. The Americans' goal was not necessarily ideological but rather to prevent the German enemy from gaining access to war supplies controlled by the Bolsheviks, though the United States also tacitly supported the White movement against the Bolsheviks.John W. Long, "American Intervention in Russia: The North Russian Expedition, 1918–19." Diplomatic History 6.1 (1982): 45–68. online
From 1820 until 1917, about 3.3 million immigrants arrived in the U.S. from the Russian Empire. Most were Jews, Poles, or Lithuanians; only 100,000 were ethnic Russians.
United States and the Soviet Union
By 1921, after the Bolsheviks gained the upper hand in the Russian Civil War, executed the Romanov imperial family, repudiated the tsarist debt, and called for a world revolution by the working class, it was regarded as a pariah nation by most of the world. Beyond the Russian Civil War, relations were also dogged by claims of American companies for compensation for the nationalized industries they had invested in. The U.S., while starting to develop trade and economic ties, was the last major world power that continued to refuse to formally recognize the Soviet government.Признание Америки Radio Liberty, April 30, 2018. The United States and Soviet Russia established diplomatic relations in November 1933.
The United States and the Soviet Union, along with Britain, were the leaders of the Allies against the Axis powers during World War II. Following the onset of the Cold War in 1947, the North Atlantic Treaty was signed by the U.S., Canada, and several Western European nations, on April 4, 1949, a treaty that established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) designed to provide collective security against the Soviet Union.North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 1949 U.S. Department of State.
The first bilateral treaty between the U.S. and Soviet Russia/USSR was a consular convention signed in Moscow in June 1964.Luman H. Long. 1968 Centennial Edition. The World Almanac and Book of Facts. Newspaper Enterprise Association, Inc., N.Y., N.Y., p. 532.Консульская конвенция между Правительством Союза Советских Социалистических Республик и Правительством Соединенных Штатов Америки In 1975, the Helsinki Final Act was signed by a multitude of countries, including the USSR and the US, and, while not having a binding legal power of a treaty, it effectively signified the U.S.-led West's recognition of the Soviet Union's dominance in Eastern Europe and acceptance of the Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that had been effected in 1940. The Act came to play a role in subsequently ending the Cold War.
In the 1970s—1980s, the USSR and the U.S. signed a series of arms control treaties such as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972), two Strategic Arms Limitation treaties (SALT), the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (1987); in July 1991 the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was concluded.
In the late 1980s, Eastern Europe nations took advantage of the relaxation of Soviet control under General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and began to break away from communist rule. The relationship greatly improved in the final years of the USSR.
On December 3, 1989, Soviet general secretary Gorbachev and U.S. president George H. W. Bush declared the Cold War over at the Malta Summit.Malta summit ends Cold War, BBC News, December 3, 1989. Retrieved June 11, 2008.
Both countries agreed to cut their strategic nuclear weapons by 30 percent, and the Soviet Union promised to reduce its intercontinental ballistic missile force by 50 percent.Greene, p. 204 In August 1991, hard-line Communists launched a coup against Gorbachev; while the coup quickly fell apart, it broke the remaining power of Gorbachev and the central Soviet government.Naftali, George H. W. Bush (2007), pp. 137–138 Later that month, Gorbachev resigned as general secretary of the Communist party, but remained president of the Soviet Union, and Russian president Boris Yeltsin ordered the seizure of Soviet property. Gorbachev clung to power as the president of the Soviet Union until December 25, 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved.Greene, pp. 205–206 Fifteen states emerged from the Soviet Union, with the largest and most populous one, Russia, taking full responsibility for all the rights and obligations of the USSR under the Charter of the United Nations, including the financial obligations. As such, Russia assumed the Soviet Union's UN membership and permanent membership on the Security Council, nuclear stockpile and the control over the armed forces; Soviet embassies abroad became Russian embassies. Bush and Yeltsin met in February 1992, declaring a new era of "friendship and partnership". In January 1993, Bush and Yeltsin agreed to START II, which provided for further nuclear arms reductions on top of the original START treaty.
History Dissolution of the Soviet Union through Yeltsin's terms (1991–99)
With Communist politicians and parties in Eastern Europe mostly defunct, on December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union self-dissolved, and the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose association was formed on December 8–21 by eventually 12 of the 15 Soviet constituent Union Republics, leaving out earlier the three Baltic states.On September 6, 1991, the State Council of the USSR at its first meeting recognized the independence of the three Baltic republics: Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were considered to be under Soviet occupation by the United States and others. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic became the Russian Federation. It was now an independent state that inherited the USSR's UN Security Council permanent membership and became the sole continuator state to the USSR and one of 12 successor states to the USSR.