WASHINGTON, 3 July 2007 — 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, the Kremlin leader 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 American president.
The US president hopes to re-establish 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 US superiority and unwillingness to accept second-tier status.
Neither side expects any breakthroughs on the issues most dividing them, such as planned US 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 onto a more even keel, at least until their successors are chosen next year.
The two sides have moved in recent days to ease tensions in advance of the Bush-Putin meeting in Kennebunkport yesterday. On Thursday, according to a US 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 US missile defense plan. That could ease fears of a new Cold War-style arms race.
And on Friday, the official said, US Ambassador William Burns and a Russian counterpart initialed an agreement on civilian nuclear cooperation.
Still, Russia has not shied away from continuing to crack down on dissent at home in the recent days despite criticism by Washington, using a questionable criminal investigation to effectively shut down a US-funded organization that trains Russian journalists.
Moreover, both sides held meetings in the days leading up to Kennebunkport intended to send pointed messages to the other: Bush met at the White House with Toomas Ilves, president of Estonia, the former Soviet republic that has come under pressure from Moscow lately, while Putin at the Kremlin hosted Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, perhaps Bush’s most virulent critic in Latin America.
How the US-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 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington three months later seemed to ratify that, as Putin overruled hardliners and permitted US troops to set up bases in Central Asia, a traditional Russian sphere.
But relations began to shift in 2003 with the launch 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 meeting with US officials and opinion leaders.
A succession of 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, captivated at their first meeting by the Russian leader’s story of his devotion 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.
Others say Bush missed an opportunity to cement the early friendship by reciprocating after Putin accepted US forces in Central Asia, NATO expansion into the Baltic states and US abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. In the Russian view, Washington never responded, not even lifting 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.”
He also is in 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 to an international security conference in Munich in February with Defense Secretary Robert 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 past Putin grievances, US officials were stunned by the harshness of the attack.
“That really slapped the administration upside the head and served as a wakeup 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 retarget 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 anti-missile 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.
