Trying to Revive Bond With a Bolder Putin

Breakthroughs Unlikely, but Seaside Talks Will Allow Bush to Dip a Toe in Detente

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 1, 2007; A05

The first time Vladimir Putin met President Bush's dog at the White House, the Russian president seemed distinctly unimpressed. When Putin later played host at his dacha outside Moscow, he presented his Labrador to Bush.

"Bigger, tougher, stronger, faster, meaner," Putin boasted, "than Barney."

In many ways, Russia is a bigger, tougher, stronger nation than it was when Putin took office -- and the relationship with the United States is certainly meaner. Putin, the first world leader to call Bush and offer help after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has evolved from a potential partner to one of the most vexing players on the world stage for the U.S. president.

As Putin arrives this afternoon in Kennebunkport, Maine, for an overnight stay at the Bush family compound, the president hopes to reestablish some of the rapport the two shared six years ago when they first met. But Putin these days is determined to play a more assertive role, one powered by Russia's oil-driven economic resurrection and fueled by resentment of U.S. superiority and unwillingness to accept second-tier status.

Neither side expects any breakthroughs on the issues most dividing them, such as planned U.S. missile defense deployments in Eastern Europe or independence for the Serbian province of Kosovo. More important may be determining whether the two leaders can get relations back on a more even keel, at least until their successors are chosen next year.

"Kennebunkport represents the last real opportunity for the two presidents to reverse the downward slide that's characterized U.S.-Russian relations the last several years," said Steven Pifer, a former Bush State Department official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "But having said that, expectations should be modest."

Some Russia scholars said the meeting may even be counterproductive, seemingly rewarding Putin with a rare invitation to Kennebunkport, even though he recently compared Bush policies to those of the Third Reich and threatened to point missiles at Europe. "It sends all the wrong signals," said Michael McFaul of Stanford University. "It says, 'I can call you Hitler, and you will invite me to your summer home.' It says Russia is strong and the Americans are weak."

Still, the two sides have moved in recent days to ease tensions in advance of the meeting. On Thursday, according to a U.S. official, the Kremlin notified Washington that it would allow in inspectors under the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, despite Putin's recent statement that he was suspending the pact in protest of the U.S. missile defense plan. That could ease fears of a new Cold War-style arms race.

And on Friday, the official said, U.S. Ambassador William J. Burns and a Russian counterpart initialed an agreement on civilian nuclear cooperation. Bush aides played down the prospect that the two presidents would sign the agreement in Kennebunkport, but it appears to be ready to be announced tomorrow or soon after.

Still, Russia has continued to crack down on dissent at home, despite criticism by Washington, and used a questionable criminal investigation to effectively shut down a U.S.-funded organization that trains Russian journalists.

Moreover, each side has held meetings in recent days intended to send pointed messages to the other: Bush met at the White House with Toomas Hendrik Ilves, president of Estonia, a former Soviet republic that has come under pressure from Moscow lately, and Putin hosted at the Kremlin President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, perhaps Bush's most virulent critic in Latin America.

How the U.S.-Russian relationship deteriorated to its lowest point since the Cold War has consumed specialists in both capitals. During their first meeting, in Slovenia in June 2001, Bush famously said he looked into Putin's eyes and got a sense of his soul. The aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon three months later seemed to ratify that, as Putin overruled hard-liners and permitted U.S. troops to set up bases in Central Asia, a traditional Russian sphere.

But relations began to shift in 2003 with the launching of the Iraq war, which Putin opposed, and worsened months later with the Russian government's politically charged arrest of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Putin rival, just weeks after he had been in Washington to meet with U.S. officials and opinion leaders. Pifer recalled a memo sent that fall to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell warning of problems with Russia. Powell later published a biting critique in a Russian newspaper.

Subsequent events left Bush increasingly disturbed: Putin's cancellation of gubernatorial elections after the Beslan school siege; his attempts to dominate neighboring Ukraine by influencing its elections and cutting off its natural gas; and, most recently, the polonium poisoning of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko in London.

"At the beginning . . . it looked like we were on track," said John R. Bolton, who as undersecretary of state and ambassador to the United Nations dealt often with Russian officials. "Clearly, something went wrong between 2003 and 2005."

Many in Washington believe Bush misread Putin, and was captivated at their first meeting by the Russian leader's attachment to a cross his mother gave him. Bush saw a democrat instead of a former KGB colonel intent on reconsolidating power in the Kremlin. "There were a lot of signs that President Putin was not the reformer that President Bush was betting on," said Sarah Mendelson, a Russia specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Others say Bush missed an opportunity to cement the early friendship by reciprocating after Putin accepted U.S. forces in Central Asia, NATO expansion into the Baltic states and U.S. abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. In the Russian view, Washington never responded, not even to lift trade restrictions, even though they no longer apply to China and other Communist nations.

"Russia expected something in return," said Fyodor Lukyanov, editor in chief of the journal Russia in Global Affairs. And so did Putin. "Now after several years of, as he sees it, being ignored by the West, he decided, 'Okay, I will be in a different style, and then you will hear me.' I think he feels a very deep disappointment toward the West."

Stanislav Belkovsky, a Moscow analyst once close to Putin's circle, said the Russian president genuinely wanted to be seen as a Westernizing leader and felt snubbed by Europe and the United States. "He wants to be respected and appreciated, not described as some KGB colonel," Belkovsky said. "Putin feels offended. Putin is frustrated because he is not appreciated."

He also is in a position to challenge the United States in a way he was not when he came to office, presiding over a country that has wiped out its foreign debt, expanded its economy more than fivefold and rectified the internal collapse of the 1990s, after the end of the Soviet Union.

"Things are getting better in Russia," Putin spokesman Dmitri Peskov told journalists at The Washington Post last month. "We are not so preoccupied with domestic problems. Things are back on track, and they are developing positively. . . . It's like a human body that has revived. And now Russia and President Putin can be more preoccupied with defending interests on the international stage."

He made that clear at an international security conference in Munich in February with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in the audience. Putin said the United States had "overstepped its national borders in every way," ignoring the views of other powers, risking a new arms race and making the world a more dangerous place. Although his words were generally consistent with his past grievances, U.S. officials were stunned by their harshness.

"That really slapped the administration upside the head and served as a wake-up call," said Clifford Kupchan, an analyst at the Eurasia Group. "The administration was still thinking of Russia as a junior disciple, not as a rising, increasingly assertive regional power."

Putin soon was threatening to re-target missiles at Europe because of the new missile defense system, but he pivoted during a meeting in Germany last month to propose that the United States abandon plans for an antimissile radar in the Czech Republic and instead use a Russian one in Azerbaijan. Although the Russian radar is considered inadequate for targeting incoming missiles, the idea put Bush on the defensive and made Putin look as if he were compromising.

This weekend's visit at Walker's Point, the Bush compound perched on the ocean, will give the president a chance to hit the reset button to some extent. It is the first time the president has brought a foreign leader to his parents' home. With his father, former president George H.W. Bush, as host, the two leaders will have more-relaxed time together and will possibly go fishing. They will have a private dinner tonight and meet with reporters tomorrow. But both sides cautioned against expecting breakthroughs.

"Don't forget that leaders can be friends; they can remain friends even if they have disagreements," said Peskov, the Putin spokesman. "But there is also a limit beyond which their friendship cannot go. There is a limit of national interests. Each of them has to defend his national interests."

Correspondent Peter Finn in Moscow contributed to this report.