By STEPHEN FIDLER

The severe blow dealt to Russia by the West’s financial crisis is prompting a recalibration of Russia’s foreign policy. Among the ideas now surfacing in Moscow: a much closer relationship between Russia and the European Union.

Mr. Putin attacked the West during a speech in Munich in 2007.

After years of rapid economic growth, Russia was hit hard by the crisis. Last year, its economy shrank by 7.9%. That put its economic performance in 206th place out of 213 countries, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.

“What became clear from the financial crisis is that Russia is not a sustainable BRIC,” said Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, using the initials for Brazil, Russia, India and China coined in 2001 to identify fast-growing, emerging economic powers. “While the other BRICs kept on growing, Russia’s economy contracted. This emphasized the limits of Russian power.”

The enthusiastic “Russia is Back” slogans being bandied about two or three years ago have been replaced by growing fears of further decline. A draft report prepared by Russian members of the Valdai International Discussion Club, a group of academics and journalists who met over the past week in Russia, spelled out that fear.

Unless Russia and the EU join forces and develop a strategy for co-development, the report said, “their international political influence will most likely be doomed to degradation.” Without that alliance, the report said, Europe would turn into a “monument to its old grandeur,” while Russia would risk becoming a raw-materials backyard for a rising Asia.

In a meeting Friday with members of the Valdai group, President Dmitry Medvedev reiterated that Russia has no alternative but to modernize its economy and political system. Asked whether China’s model of economic changes without political liberalization might have worked better for Russia, he said, “that path would be impossible for us.” He called democracy a “necessary condition” for Russian development, brushing off criticisms that his government is authoritarian.

Delicate Diplomacy

A destroyed building in South Ossetia in 2008.

Milestones in Russian-European Relations

June 1994: Russia joins NATO’s Partnership for Peace program.

December 1996: NATO declares its policy of enlargement to former members of the Warsaw Pact.

May 1998: EU-Russia summits begin in Birmingham England.

March-June 1999: NATO attacks Yugoslavia over Kosovo, causing a crisis between the West and Russia.

January 2006: Russia closes natural gas supplies to Ukraine, the first of several disputes to cut off gas to Europe.

November 2006: Radioactive poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London causes cooling of U.K.-Russian relations.

February 2007: President Vladimir Putin’s speech in Munich attacks the West for its foreign-policy deceptions.

August 2008: Russia-Georgia war plunges relations between EU and Russia to a new low.

November 2009: President Dmitry Medvedev proposes New European Security Treaty.

“There is democracy in Russia. Yes, it is young, immature, inexperienced—but it is democracy. We are at the very beginning of the path,” he said in a speech at a political forum later Friday.

One motive for moving closer to Europe, some analysts say, is fear of China’s economic powerhouse and what it will mean for Russia’s increasingly sparsely populated lands. (United Nations projections suggest by 2050 there will be 116 million Russians and 1.4 billion Chinese, compared with 140 million Russians and 1.3 billion Chinese now.)

At the Valdai conference, some Russians spoke of China and Asia as an alternative if Moscow is spurned by Europe. At a meeting with foreign members of the group, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin repeatedly emphasized his country has nothing to fear from China. However, some participants argued that Asia’s future is very uncertain even five years out.

Others questioned what closer ties to China would mean. Greater economic integration with China was described by one Russian speaker as the “union of a rabbit and a boa constrictor.” In this metaphor, Russia wasn’t the boa constrictor.

Up to now, the EU’s own regular meetings with Russia have achieved little, encouraging some Russians to speculate that the only thing that interests European governments about Russia is its natural gas.

While Germany has usually been the EU country seeking the closest relations, some new member states along with others such as the U.K. harbor suspicions about Moscow’s intentions.

More recently, however, bilateral tensions have eased, notably with Poland. The last winter wasn’t accompanied by threats that Russian natural-gas supplies to Europe would be cut off; and there have been no repeats of the 2008 Georgia war or murders like that in London of Alexander Litvinenko. Russia stayed out of Kyrgyszstan’s ethnic troubles this year, suggesting less of an appetite for military interventions in its near-abroad. President Medvedev has called repeatedly over the past year for an all-European security pact..

But there is still a huge gap between Europe and Russia. “Russia’s world view focuses more on power than on rules,” which largely guide the EU’s behavior, Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform, told the Valdai group.

One foreign participant, suggesting that Russia’s enormous size meant it couldn’t be integrated into the EU, cited what he said was a Chinese saying: “Encourage the elephant to go into the refrigerator and close the door behind it.”

The Valdai report speaks of a “values gap” between Russia and hints at Russia’s impatience with lecturing from a pious EU. But the fact is, said many experts, the EU won’t cozy up to an autocratic power with rampant government corruption, an arbitrary legal system, and scant regard for human rights. Moreover, the suspicion will remain among many in the EU that as soon as oil prices go back up, Russia will start throwing its weight around again.

Some would like to test Russia’s good faith before moving ahead. Germany has suggested Russia could help resolve the frozen conflict in Moldova, where the Russian-speaking population of Transdniester has broken away. Mr. Putin this week spoke of future “cooperation” between Georgia’s breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and the Georgian government—a vague statement that led some of his audience to suggest he may be hinting at a solution in which Georgia could remain whole.

Much closer union between Russia and the EU, however, appears to many experts to be a long way off. For one thing, the EU is still in the throes of a financial crisis that is likely to keep it absorbed and unwilling to embark on major new initiatives. The perceived benefits of hugging the Russian bear may not be tempting enough to bring EU countries together. And then there is Russia.

“The main obstacle to any union with Europe is that we are not ready,” said one Russian speaking at the conference under the usual rules of nonattribution. “You can’t combine an airplane and a steam engine.”

—Gregory L. White contributed to this article.