Word: russian
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...desire for his first encounter with Putin to go smoothly. In the first few months after taking office, Bush was under constant assault by European allies for his unilateralist foreign policy, including his snubbing of Moscow. Among the signs of disrespect: the ouster from the U.S. of 50 alleged Russian diplomat-spies in March 2001, the five-month delay before setting a first Bush-Putin meeting, and the threat, since carried out, to withdraw unilaterally from the 1972 U.S.-Soviet Antiballistic Missile Treaty in order to build a national missile-defense system. British Prime Minister Tony Blair personally urged Bush...
...Putin had his own agenda. Not long after he took over from Yeltsin in late 1999, the new Russian President began making overtures to the West, first to Blair and then to NATO. Faced with an economic crisis, Putin believed he had no choice but to speed Russia's integration into the world economy. To succeed, he would have to win over the leader of the world's only "hyperpower," as the U.S. is sometimes called in Russia. Before Ljubljana, says a former aide, Putin "devoured an enormous amount of information on Bush and everything related to him." He knew...
...Cozying up to America poses risks for Putin. His embrace of the West has critics in the military and elsewhere quietly grumbling that he has been "Gorbachevized," that he's selling Russia out in exchange for a pat on the head from the U.S. President. In a poll of Russians published last week in Izvestia, 52% of the respondents said they still view NATO as a threat to Moscow, while a newspaper sourly announced the arms accord with the headline Russia Has Lost the Nuclear War. Still, Putin has kept his generals happy by waging an aggressive and often brutal...
...Another thing Putin wanted - America's acquiescence to his military campaign in Chechnya - in many ways has already been received. Because of Rice's conviction that U.S.-Russian relations should focus on strategic issues instead of internal affairs, the Bush Administration downgraded Chechnya as a point of contention, and that disposition only hardened after Sept. 11. "Putin wants us to legitimate what he's doing in Chechnya, to equate it with the war on terrorism," says Michael McFaul, another former colleague from Rice's days as a professor and provost at Stanford. "He wants Bush to come to Moscow...
...help Bush better understand the Russian mind, Rice recently gave him several books, including her favorite - Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. The President is reading it now, but whether a novel about human weakness and the power of guilt will give him any clues on how to deal with his Russian counterpart isn't clear. More than likely, Bush will rely on the same instincts that told him in Slovenia that Putin was a man he could trust. After the visit, Bush aides expect the relationship between the two to grow stronger. Rice goes to great lengths to emphasize that...