The U-turn over the Atlantic by the Russian Prime Minister, Mr Yevgeny Primakov, on Tuesday, when he cancelled his visit to Washington as the Kosovo crisis heightened, was the most dramatic example so far of Russia's growing differences with the West on the issue. Here was a Russian leader on his way to meet the Vice-President of the United States and officials of the International Monetary Fund, in an effort to raise funds for his country's shattered economy, turning his back on aid rather than supporting air strikes against Slobodan Milosevic.
To many it was a position which simply did not make sense. Why, they ask, should Russia support such an evil schemer as the Yugoslav President? In fact, Russia claims it is not supporting Milosevic and that it has condemned his actions several times.
It is simply convinced that air strikes by NATO are not the way to solve the problems of Kosovo.
Russia and Serbia, it has often been pointed out, have strong historical links; they have been allies over the centuries; they share a common Slavic heritage and in religion are members of the same Orthodox communion. These links have, according to some analysts, put Russia in the Serbian camp. There is a great deal of evidence, however, that such an analysis is simply a smokescreen.
It is true that President Yeltsin, inasmuch as his power and influence remain, and Mr Primakov have to look over their shoulders at the Communist-Nationalist alliance in the State Duma in a year in which elections to that lower house of parliament will take place. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation, under Mr Gennady Zyuganov, dominates the parliament, and support for the "Slavic brothers" in Serbia has long been part of the party's attraction for a section of the Russian electorate.
But even this element is by no means a serious influence on Russian policy. The real basis for Russia's position of "support for Milosevic" as some see it or "less-than-enthusiastic opposition to Milosevic" in other eyes, focuses almost entirely on NATO's role.
It is little more than a week since NATO, for the first time, began to share a border with Russia. NATO has now admitted Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland. The Czech Republic and Hungary lie close enough to Russia but Poland actually has a common border with Russia's Kaliningrad enclave. The old enemy of the Soviet Union, once the threat from over the seas, is now the wolf at Russia's door.
The response has been quite an emotional one. At a press briefing last week at the Russian Foreign ministry, the ministry's chief spokesman, Mr Vladimir Rakhmanin, put it this way: "We are somewhat concerned about the fact that the ceremonial part of the admission of the three countries to NATO is connected with Cold War elements and the history of the Cold War. In particular, the instruments of ratification were handed over in the Harry Truman Library, named after a US president whose name is closely associated with the unfavourable developments after World War Two."
Those comments, centring as they do on minor elements of protocol, go a long way towards illustrating just how sore a point NATO expansion is in Moscow. The admission to the alliance of the three former Warsaw Pact countries was a reminder to Russia of its loss of face in a geographical area which was once indisputably within its sphere of influence.
For NATO to take military action in Yugoslavia would be an even sharper reminder to Russia of its waning power. It would represent a military attack by the United States into an area that Russia has for centuries considered to be its own back yard. The Balkans was probably the last area in Europe in which Russia considered itself to be the influential regional power.
Russia's alleged influence in Serbia and, more particularly, with Slobodan Milosevic may, however, have been greatly overestimated. Moscow's appeals to Belgrade to talk rather than fight and most recently to accept the Rambouillet political document have failed.
Some analysts felt that Mr Milosevic may even have treated Russia as a "fall guy" in escalating the conflict in Kosovo in the belief that no air strikes would take place during Mr Primakov's Washington visit. By cancelling his visit, Mr Primakov, with the greatest of irony, removed that particular obstacle to a NATO bombing mission.