Bush, Putin Set Aside Feuds at Talks in Russia

After months of feuding, President Bush and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin met Sunday and emphasized harmony and personal chemistry, a reflection of common policy goals as they prepared to mark the 60th anniversary of the defeat of the Nazis.

The focus on good feelings underscored the belief of both governments that their recent bickering might be a distraction from far more pressing matters such as the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran.

Bush and Putin met for nearly an hour and a half at the Russian president’s estate near Moscow, accompanied only by interpreters for 40 minutes before being joined by national security aides and other officials. A dinner between the two first couples that was scheduled for about an hour stretched to more than two hours and included a tour of the estate compound, U.S. national security advisor Stephen Hadley said.

Officials said the talks focused largely on the Middle East, with Bush and Putin agreeing to back Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s planned pullout from the Gaza Strip and to offer support to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. They also touched on North Korea and Iran, officials said.

“This meeting has demonstrated once again that for the two presidents there are no forbidden topics,” said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei V. Lavrov, appearing after the session with his U.S. counterpart, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Rice, similarly, said that Bush and Putin “feel that they can discuss anything.”

“They say what they think, they say what they mean, and then they act on that,” she said.

Bush, seated next to Putin, joined about 50 other world leaders and some 8,000 invitees in Red Square this morning as a massive Victory Day military parade got underway. More than 7,000 soldiers and about 2,600 World War II veterans were to take part.

Sunday evening, on the grounds of Putin’s estate, the two presidents took a spin in a shiny, white Soviet-made 1956 Volga sedan. Bush took the wheel, and at one point called out: “I’m having so much fun we’re going for another lap.”

They joked about First Lady Laura Bush’s comic performance at a Washington gala last week where she poked fun at her husband’s early bedtimes and lack of Texas ranch bona fides.

“I could see how Laura attacked you sometimes, so at today’s dinner we will have a chance to protect you,” Putin cracked.

The joviality contrasted with the leaders’ performance during a February meeting in Slovakia, at which Bush nudged Putin on his recent centralizing of power in the Kremlin and Putin fired back with a suggestion that the U.S. Electoral College might be less democratic than Russia’s direct presidential elections.

In an interview that aired Sunday on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” Putin took that notion a step further, noting that Bush took office in 2001 only after a court ruling.

The two leaders and their governments have also sparred over Bush’s decision to bracket his Moscow trip with visits to Latvia on Saturday and to Georgia on Tuesday.

Both nations are former Soviet republics, and each has growing ties to the U.S., Latvia already being a member of NATO and the European Union. The Russians have expressed concerns about encirclement.

In Riga, the Latvian capital, Bush met with the leaders of three Baltic nations. The presidents of Lithuania and Estonia were skipping today’s military parade in Moscow to protest Putin’s refusal to apologize for the fact that the Nazi defeat led to the Soviet occupation of their countries. Latvia’s president voiced reservations but planned to attend.

U.S. officials were so eager to display cooperation that, after the meeting, Hadley defended Putin’s recent remarks calling the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 “the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century.”

Baltic leaders, who considered the downfall a liberation, were outraged by the comments. Hadley said that, “in context,” it was clear the Russian president was talking about the dislocation of populations and other traumas.

And Russian officials pointed to a line in the speech that Bush delivered Saturday in Riga in which he highlighted the need for the Baltic nations to respect ethnic minorities, a nod to concerns expressed by Putin that Russians living in those countries face discrimination.

Experts said the attempt to demonstrate good feelings reflected a recognition by both powers that they need each other, even if each leader occasionally snipes at the other.

“Russia and the U.S. have got a huge number of tasks that the two countries need to tackle jointly, missions where the U.S. and Russia are complete allies, even if these allied relations are not declared by the U.S. president out loud,” said Sergei Markov, director of the Institute of Political Studies, a Moscow think tank with ties to the Kremlin.

“George Bush simply cannot say this in public, for a large number of people in the U.S. Congress have ground down their teeth criticizing Russia.”

Still, it was clear Sunday that all is not as cheery as the leaders’ performance might suggest.

Russian experts said Bush’s decision to travel to Latvia and Georgia demonstrated that, despite the appearances Sunday, the U.S. increasingly views Russia as just another post-Soviet nation.

“On President Bush’s itinerary, Moscow was intentionally put on the list of what was perceived in Moscow as capitals of rather low importance -- [with] Riga and Tbilisi,” said Viktor Kremenyuk, deputy director of Moscow’s USA-Canada Institute.

“And it was done absolutely deliberately. It was done in order to show it to Moscow that it is not all that big a deal after all.

“Putin realizes that if friendly relations with Bush are lost, then it will be a total fiasco for himself,” Kremenyuk said. “If it becomes clear that Bush no longer trusts Putin and is no longer ready to do business with Putin, then it may well become the turning point in Putin’s career, with the Russian elite beginning to look for a replacement.”

Despite Hadley’s defense of Putin’s recent speech, in which the Russian president laid out what he said was a commitment to Russian-style democracy, he acknowledged to reporters that the U.S. had yet to see satisfactory results.

Washington has complained that Putin has cracked down on the media and centralized power in the Kremlin.

“Obviously those words have to be translated into deeds, and we expect that as that happens, it will allow the United States and Russia to have an even closer relationship,” Hadley said.

He added that it was not clear whether Putin and Bush had privately discussed Baltic concerns over Soviet occupation. Bush has publicly straddled the dispute, speaking of the Soviet role in defeating the Nazis while also denouncing Soviet tyranny.

In a dramatic moment in Riga, Bush acknowledged that the United States had helped contribute to the Soviet rise by signing an agreement with the Soviet Union and Britain at Yalta in 1945 that set the framework for postwar spheres of influence in Europe.

Bush said the agreement sacrificed smaller nations in the interest of stability, a point that he used to justify his agenda of promoting democracy throughout the world, even at great cost.

Rice, speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on the way to Moscow after a ceremony honoring U.S. World War II veterans buried at a cemetery in the Netherlands, appeared to back away from that statement. Some had interpreted it as a slight of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who signed the deal.

“I think he was trying to make clear that nobody doubts the intentions of the American leadership in 1945, which was clearly to end the war and to have free elections in Eastern Europe,” she said.

“You may remember that the plan was to have free elections in Poland, followed by free elections in the rest of Eastern Europe. It didn’t turn out that way, and, unfortunately, people were consigned to a divided Europe.”