The United States and Russia maintain strategic foreign relations. They have had diplomatic relations since the establishment of the latter country 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, nonproliferation, 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.