Russia applied for membership in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1993, but throughout the 1990s negotiations were slow and formal. Soon after Putin became president in 2000, he energized Russia's half-hearted attempts to enter the WTO. He made a commitment that Russia would accede in 2003. Now in 2006, Russian officials are talking about joining in one year's time, as they talked in the late 1990s.
On November 10 Russia and the United States finally announced that they had reached agreement on a bilateral protocol on market access for Russia's accession to the WTO, and the United States declared that this was a good commercial deal.
The main work that remains is negotiation on the multilateral memorandum for Russia's accession. A general expectation is that these multilateral negotiations cannot be settled until late 2007.
The West wants to make sure that Russia is really enforcing its new legislation in defense of intellectual property rights. Russia still insists on its right to introduce far higher domestic agricultural subsidies than the European Union and the United States are prepared to accept, which is a typical question left to the very end of the negotiations.