Russian attitude to West sinks to worst point since Cold War's end

`I see no difference in the behaviour of NATO and Hitler. It is the same." This statement was made not by Mr Vladimir Zhirinovsky or by the head of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Mr Gennady Zyuganov. The man who uttered these outrageous words was once a hero in the West for his outspoken attacks on the Soviet regime.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's political views have always tended towards Great-Russian chauvinism. They were welcomed when it suited the Western anti-communist line, but now that the Cold War is over he is dismissed as a crank. Certainly his view that "NATO wants to establish its order in the world, and it needs Yugoslavia simply as a pretext - let's punish Yugoslavia and the whole planet will tremble," bears the hallmarks of paranoia.

Crank though he may be, his equation of NATO with Hitler is an indication of how low Russia's perception of the West and particularly of the Alliance has fallen in the aftermath of the Balkan war. Solzhenitsyn's extreme views may be shared only by a minority of Russians, but the general mood remains strongly anti-Western with only two ultra-liberal politicians - Mr Konstantin Borovoy and the former foreign minister, Mr Andrei Kozyrev - openly supporting the West's military actions in Yugoslavia.

Even Mr Grigory Yavlinsky, leader of the pro-Western neo-liberal Yabloko party, has strongly opposed NATO actions. The difference between the "slavophile" Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his followers on the one side and the "Westernising" Mr Yavlinsky on the other lies mainly in the degree of vehemence with which they have spoken against the bombings and the basic reasons for their anti-NATO stances.

While claiming victory in their military campaigns, NATO and western European countries will now face the task of repairing not only the homes of the Kosovar Albanians but relations with an adversary which is economically weak, politically unstable but the possessor of thousands of nuclear warheads.

It is not going to be easy for NATO, and it is not going to be easy for the EU. The appointment of Mr Javier Solana, regarded in Russia as akin to the anti-Christ, as the EU's foreign policy chief is already being greeted with suspicion in Moscow.

The communists and ultra-nationalists whose opposition to the Yugoslav conflict was based in virulent anti-American xenophobia will simply not be won over no matter what the West does. Others who see the place of Russia and the United Nations diminished by the American-led NATO action and who have learned to be wary of all military action after Afghanistan and Chechnya are probably greater in number and a little more open to Western wooing.

Even the latter group, however, is extremely wary of NATO. They may despise Slobodan Milosevic but they see NATO's actions, particularly its "high-flying" policy with its inevitable civilian casualties, as hypocritical in the extreme. Ms Dominique Moisi, the editor of Politique Etrangere in Paris, has described NATO's attitude towards its cause as "worth fighting for but not worth dying for." This is a view shared right across Russia's political spectrum and denounced as immoral.

The fact that the war came immediately after NATO's inclusion of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary as members rang alarm bells in Moscow.