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Bush and Putin find limits to personal diplomacy

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Times Staff Writer

Seven years ago, President Bush famously said after his first private meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin, “I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

The freshman president’s declaration about his initial encounter with the veteran KGB agent was criticized as naive, but it characterized Bush’s effort to personalize his relationship with one of his most important counterparts on the world stage.

With a month to go in Putin’s presidency, and Bush’s second term coming to an end, the two met Saturday for dinner at a Russian presidential vacation home on the Black Sea shore.

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Even after seven years, and private meetings in settings as varied as Bush’s rain-soaked ranch in late autumn and Putin’s woodsy dacha amid the McMansions on Moscow’s outskirts, the message on the eve of their work session today was: Personal diplomacy can go only so far, and in a crunch, national interests certainly trump all.

As Bush has put it, they have had their “diplomatic head-butts.”

Bush arrived in Sochi at the end of a weeklong trip that drew into focus the evolution of Central and Eastern Europe during his presidency -- and also just how much has not changed in the U.S.-Russian relationship.

Putin, who met Friday with leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization at a summit in Bucharest, the Romanian capital, did not hide his displeasure with two of the alliance’s central actions: the promise of eventual NATO membership to Ukraine and Georgia, two countries on Russia’s southern border that once were part of the Soviet Union, and the endorsement of a Bush plan to place missile interceptors and radars in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Putin says the missile defense system would threaten the value of Russia’s warheads. Bush says it is intended to protect the United States, much of Europe and, potentially, Russia from missiles that could be launched by Iran or from elsewhere in the Middle East.

NATO’s expansion was very much on Putin’s mind when he complained, at a news conference Friday in Bucharest, about the alliance’s eastward expansion and other steps.

Arguing that not all democracies are in NATO, and that immediate admission to NATO would not have made Ukraine, by definition, a democracy, Putin asked, “What is this nonsense?”

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After seven years of lunches, dinners and home visits, it was an echo of the concerns Putin raised when they first met, in Slovenia on June 16, 2001.

And Bush, who more often than not talks about sprinting to the finish line of his presidency, sounded just a tad weary, in a senior aide’s account of the president’s remarks at the NATO meeting with Putin.

“You know, we’re two old war horses and we’re both getting ready to step down from our positions,” was the aide’s characterization of Bush’s nod to Putin, which ignored the Russian’s continued grip on power as prime minister under Dmitry Medvedev, his handpicked, elected successor.

Bush will meet privately with Medvedev after a business meeting with Putin this morning, before a final working lunch with both.

White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said Bush and Putin probably would not be able to overcome their differences on missile defense this weekend. They had not been expected to do so.

She also told reporters on the flight here that Bush and Putin were working to hand over to their successors a written summary of key points in the U.S.-Russian relationship, dealing with security cooperation, weapons nonproliferation, counter-terrorism and economic issues.

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Bush spent Saturday morning in blossom-dappled Zagreb, Croatia, in a stop dedicated to demonstrating, as he did in Bucharest and before that in Kiev, Ukraine, the extent of the transformation that has taken place in Europe since the Iron Curtain gave way nearly two decades ago.

Speaking to an estimated 6,000 people in a square in Zagreb’s old city, Bush saluted Croatia’s emergence from the ethnic wars of the Balkans, its “maturing democracy” and its admission last week to NATO.

“Should any danger threaten your people, America and the NATO alliance will stand with you, and no one will be able to take your freedom away,” Bush said.

The address was one in a series Bush has given over the years to large crowds in nations that were under Moscow’s sway during the Cold War, each built around the theme of emerging democracy and freedom.

The crowd, which had been waiting for Bush for two hours in the chill of the early spring morning, interrupted the brief speech numerous times with low-key applause.

But it was largely unresponsive when he said the people of Croatia knew “the death and destruction that can be caused by the followers of radical ideologies,” connecting the sort of violence and deprivation of rights through which they had lived for decades and the turmoil of the Middle East today.

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“A great danger clouds the future of all free men and women,” he said, “and this danger sits at the doorstep of Europe.”

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james.gerstenzang @latimes.com

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