Source: New York Times

Hillary Rodham Clinton started at a disadvantage with Russian officials because she reminded them of the time Russia was weak and, some would claim, subservient to the United States, when her husband was president. But their attitude toward her never grew much warmer.

During the 2008 campaign, the Russians were surprised to see the Clinton political machine defeated by a freshman senator from Illinois. After Barack Obama offered his far more experienced rival the job of America's top diplomat, they were impressed that he kept foreign policy firmly under White House control.

Clinton marched faithfully along, but when she did have an active role in policy, Moscow saw it as destructive.

By pushing for military force in Libya, Clinton cast herself as a liberal interventionist and thus a destabilizing influence, in the eyes of Vladimir Putin and his colleagues.

Clinton's occasionally criticized the Kremlin on human rights, which did not endear her to Russia's rulers. In 2011-12, as the Russian protest movement made its presence felt in Moscow, Putin accused the State Department of engineering the protests by supporting Russian civil society organizations.

Hillary Clinton's relations with her Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, while jovial on the surface, were never easy. The two met countless times and worked productively on a range of issues, from New Start nuclear arms treaty to Afghanistan to non-proliferation.

But Clinton also made it clear that she felt she was heads above the world's other foreign ministers, and that her political ambitions reached even higher.

When Hillary Rodham Clinton announced her resignation last year, there was a sigh of relief in Moscow, followed by a sobering thought: they may not have seen the last of her.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.