YeltClint
© Wally McNamee/CORBIS/Getty ImagesUS President Bill Clinton meets Boris Yeltsin โ€ข 1996
The US and its allies missed an opportunity to neutralize Russia. The US could have turned Russia into a regular, docile client state by dragging it into the EU in the 1990s, Sergey Shoigu has claimed.

In an interview with the Rossiya-24 channel aired on Tuesday, the former defense minister recalled how in 1994 then-President Boris Yeltsin told his US counterpart, Bill Clinton, that "Russia has to be the first country to join NATO."

Shoigu said:
"If at that point they fast-tracked us into the European Union... I believe we would have lost our sovereignty by today. The resources and natural deposits that our country has would have been largely redistributed and snatched."
Russia was in a deep financial hole in the mid 1990s and relied on foreign aid to remain afloat, so it would have willingly gone into the Western fold, if offered, the official argued. Shoigu recalled that, at the time, he was monitoring the arrival of tranches of foreign subsidies to rush to the government and get some funding to pay salaries to workers at the Emergencies Ministry, which he headed.

In this week's interview, Shoigu mused:
"They've made a mistake. They should have gotten us into the EU as soon as possible. And we would be like the EU members: just a command from across the ocean, we would be folding our paws and getting ready to jump through a hoop."
As an example of European compliance with US whims, Shoigu cited the scandal involving French helicopter carriers of the Mistral class, which Russia ordered in 2011 for its Navy. The deal was called off after the 2014 armed coup in Kiev, an attempt to punish Moscow for accepting breakaway Crimea as a new Russian region.

Washington pressured Paris into tearing up the contract with Russia by leveraging the size of a pending fine on a French bank, Shoigu claimed. He was apparently referring to the Paris-listed BNP Paribas, which in June 2014 agreed to enter a guilty plea with the Americans in a case of sanctions avoidance and to pay a $9 billion penalty to close the case.

According to the French authorities, scrapping the Mistral deal at the last minute and selling the ships to Egypt instead came at a net loss of โ‚ฌ409 million ($450 mn).