Its leaders in the first decade of the new millennium had their periods of co‑operating with America, but the ambition to assert independent Russian authority was strong and getting stronger.

—Robert Service, The Penguin History of Modern Russia, (Great Britain: Penguin Books, 2020), 570.

Service’s condescension is tolerable throughout his treatment of Yeltsin, but the last couple dozen pages of Penguin History of Modern Russia are tough going. This reminds me of complaining to an Estonian acquaintance of similar observations in my readings of Baltic histories from German and British authors. „Have you read any histories of the Baltic by Baltic authors?“ he smiled.