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MOSCOW -- As a speechwriter for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s, Alexei Pushkov hailed the end of the Cold War and preached friendship with Moscow's erstwhile capitalist foes. Now he espouses a starkly different message.

Europe wants Russia to "surrender its sovereignty" by opening up its gas pipelines, he tells viewers of his television show, Post Scriptum. The roster of offenses lengthens: The West is trying to tear Russia apart by backing Chechen separatists. Ukraine's U.S.-backed Orange Revolution leaders are "hooligans."

Mr. Pushkov's evolution from rapprochement advocate to hard-line instigator -- and the popularity of his show and its message -- go a long way toward explaining the mood of resentful self-confidence prevailing here as Russia prepares to host this weekend's Group of Eight summit. The St. Petersburg meeting, testament to Russia's re-emergence as a great power whose energy resources are increasingly vital to the West, was supposed to cement the nation's place in the elite club of leading democracies. Instead, tensions between Moscow and its G-8 partners are threatening to cast a pall over the party.

Mr. Pushkov, whose program offers a useful barometer of the deteriorating relations, is one of Russia's slickest hawks -- fast-talking and tanned, with carefully coiffed salt-and-pepper hair. Every week some six million Russians tune in to watch Post Scriptum, a show that encapsulates Russia's new oil-fueled nationalism and mistrust of the U.S. Media surveys show its rating has inched up as Russia's love affair with the West has turned to rancor.

"You know, in the early 1990s we used to see the U.S. as a shining temple on the hill," Mr. Pushkov laughs. "Not any more."

Russia's relationship with the U.S. and Europe has oscillated wildly during the past 20 years, from Cold War enmity to the warm, fuzzy friendship of the Yeltsin era. Now a new frostiness has set in, fed by a geopolitical rivalry that has often placed them on opposite sides of the barricades.

Western critics have accused the Kremlin of playing politics with Russia's energy exports, intimidating its neighbors and showing unjustifiable reluctance to back the West's tough line on Iran's nuclear ambitions. Russia, meanwhile, blames Europe and the U.S. for fomenting popular uprisings in Ukraine and Georgia and trying to stop Russian energy companies from expanding abroad.

And while Mr. Pushkov's show is at the forefront of Western criticism, the sentiments aired in his arena are now echoed in liberal media as well. "People mistrust the sincerity of U.S. intentions," says Alexei Venediktov, editor in chief of the radio station Ekho Moskvy.

President Vladimir Putin gave voice to the new hostility in a May state-of-the-nation speech in which he called for a military buildup to counter "Comrade Wolf" -- an unmistakable allusion to the U.S. -- who "knows whom to eat, eats without listening and [is] clearly not going to listen to anyone."

The wariness of ordinary Russians is nowhere more obvious than on Ekho Moskvy's phone-ins. The calls used to offer a chance for Russia's beleaguered liberals -- once the station's core audience -- to sound off about Mr. Putin's hard-line policies. Now they provide a forum for the hard-liners themselves.

"Our listeners are increasingly isolationist and xenophobic," Mr. Venediktov says. "About half of them see the U.S. as an enemy."

Yet despite the strains, the consensus in Moscow's political establishment is that Russia and the U.S. will remain close, especially on security issues. "We have few potential allies with whom we can fight terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism," says Sergei Karaganov, chairman of the influential Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. "America is still a useful partner."

Indeed, the Bush administration has indicated it will make concessions to the Kremlin in the next few days -- perhaps backing Russia's bid to join the World Trade Organization and permitting U.S. civilian nuclear cooperation with Moscow -- in an effort to patch things up with Mr. Putin.

Mr. Pushkov's career embodies the highs and lows of the U.S.-Russian relationship. In the late 1980s, as a foreign-policy adviser to Mr. Gorbachev and other Politburo members, he had a hand in hastening the fall of the Berlin Wall. He pinned his faith on a united Europe in which Cold War military alliances and old-style ideological differences would melt away.

"I was one of those people who really believed we could build a real partnership with the West," he says.

In 1994, he won a grant from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to write a report on Russian foreign policy. As deputy editor of Moscow News, a liberal flagship, he was a regular guest of the White House, Pentagon and State Department during the Clinton administration.

In 1996, while working as deputy director of Russian TV's Channel One, he backed President Yeltsin's re-election bid and derided his Communist rival, Gennady Zyuganov, as anti-Western. "[Yeltsin] is the only realistic chance for a westward-looking Russia," he wrote in an editorial for this newspaper.

But disillusionment set in as NATO expanded into Eastern Europe, taking in former Warsaw Pact countries and creeping toward Russia's borders. All the West's talk of a new post-Cold War dispensation was, in the end, just talk, Mr. Pushkov said. NATO's 1999 bombing of Russia's traditional ally Serbia at the height of its war with Kosovo was the final straw -- the "biggest disappointment of all."

"We made a huge mistake," he says. "We really believed the basic relationship could change. But a new war started -- this time for geopolitical dominance."

At a cramped studio in the offices of TV-Center, a federal channel owned by the Moscow City government, Mr. Pushkov's Post Scriptum is broadcast with its characteristically hawkish spin on events.

As usual, its Armani-clad presenter squeezes in a swipe at Ukraine: Yulia Tymoshenko, one of that country's most popular politicians, is an "aggressive adventurist" backed by the U.S.; her party is the "Orange junta." The show also features an uncritical report on an Internet news conference by Mr. Putin, and disparages the U.S. media for its prurient interest in politicians' private lives -- while repeating a tabloid rumor that President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are having an affair.

Mr. Pushkov's TV persona means he is no longer so close to the Washington establishment. Ekho Moskvy's Mr. Venediktov was one of several liberal media icons quaffing white wine at a Fourth of July party in Spaso House, the U.S. ambassador's elegant Moscow residence. Mr. Pushkov, once a regular at such events, was absent.

"They haven't invited me for the last three years," Mr. Pushkov says. "These days, my message isn't quite what they want to hear."