Word: nato
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Whatever the state of their personal chemistry, then, Bush and Putin will engage each other over a widening chasm in the coming days. Besides NATO's expansion eastward, they also differ strongly over U.S. plans to deploy its missile defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland by 2012, ostensibly to intercept potential attacks from Iran. And Russia has been irked by the NATO powers' enabling of Kosovo's breakaway from Serbia, which Moscow deems illegal...
...Putin may have a compromise up his sleeve: If Russia's priority is to avoid Ukraine and Georgia being drawn into the NATO fold, a concession on the missile defense system may be part of the quid pro quo envisaged by the Russian president...
...Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia joined NATO as a guarantee against encroachment by Moscow, which had dominated them from 1945 until the end of the Cold War. Back at the close of the Cold War in the early 1990s, NATO had promised Moscow that once Soviet troops withdrew from Eastern Europe, NATO would not expand beyond West Germany. Russians decry the West's broken word, and question the purpose of NATO's encircling them from the west and south. Ukraine's prospective NATO membership is particularly painful to Russia in terms of security and emotions: Ukraine...
...Despite President Bush's support, however, prospects for Georgia and Ukraine's accession to NATO look bleak as long as key Western European powers such as Germany and France remain leery of antagonizing Russia, their major energy supplier. Accepting NATO's admission of tiny Croatia and making concessions on missile defenses might be Putin's offering by way of a sweetener for a compromise with President Bush. Last month, the Russian leader said he had received a letter from Bush that had helped achieve "final agreements" on some differences, and that now Russia and the U.S. were ready to complete...
...Putin is keeping his options open, though. Last week, Russia's envoy to NATO, Dmitri Rogozin, said that the latest U.S. proposals on missile defense in Europe "do not satisfy our security requirements." That could simply be raising the ante in the bargaining process, but it also creates a fallback position should Putin fail to achieve his desired results on Georgia and Ukraine during the Bucharest summit...