I guess Bush is not as sold on the cross that "Puty Pute" wears as he used to be.
washingtonpost.com
Bush Changing Views on Putin
Administration That Hailed Russian Leader Alters Course
By Peter Slevin and Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 14, 2003; Page A26
President Bush, who publicly credited Russian President Vladimir Putin just 10 weeks ago for promoting freedom and democracy, has protested to the Russian leader since then for moving in the opposite direction, according to senior U.S. officials.
Bush and his foreign policy team have begun to question Putin's intentions -- and their own approach -- after the abrupt imprisonment of Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and parliamentary elections derided by European monitors as an unfair government-orchestrated triumph.
"Suddenly a real debate has emerged, first on the margins in Washington and then within the administration," said Michael McFaul, a Russia scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who keeps in close touch with policymakers. "Earlier assumptions about Putin are now being reassessed."
At this point the shift on Putin carries minimal practical weight. Confronted with Putin's campaign against the independent news media, his targeting of influential businessmen and his brutal war for control of Chechnya, Bush has confined his response to expressions of displeasure, officials said.
Bush's caution combines uncertainty about Putin's ultimate direction with a lingering hope that his rhetoric about democracy and the rule of law may one day prove true, officials and analysts said. With Putin at his side at his Camp David retreat in September, Bush said "I respect President Putin's vision for Russia." It also signals a desire to avoid alienating Russia when the United States wants help on such matters as counterterrorism, Iraqi debt and worrisome nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea.
"There's a challenge here. We want to talk to the Russians and encourage their cooperation on areas where they want to cooperate," said a senior State Department official. He added that the administration intends to find ways to raise "the democracy question, the Chechnya question, the rule of law question."
Administration officials say Bush, in recent telephone conversations with Putin, has raised complaints about evidence that Putin has fallen far short of his promises to deliver pluralism and a fair legal system.
The debate over the United States' relationship with Russia had been largely dormant in administration circles since Bush famously said after meeting Putin in June 2001 that he had gotten "a sense of his soul." When Russia unreservedly joined the U.S.-led war against terrorism a few months later, the relationship seemed sealed.
But a series of strong moves by Putin this year raised fresh doubts. The Bush administration was startled when Putin sided with France and Germany in actively opposing the invasion of Iraq. Then the Russian government shut the last major independent television network in June.
In early October, it manipulated a presidential election in Chechnya and a few weeks later arrested Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man and principal shareholder in oil giant Yukos. Then came Duma elections on Dec. 7, when Putin's government, which controlled Russian media, also boosted the campaigns of its favorites. The election was termed a "regression in the democratization process" by monitors for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The Bush administration publicly agreed.
"We're certainly seeing some more worrisome signs about the direction that Putin is taking the country in terms of civil society. And, of course, there have been some ups and downs on Russian foreign policy," a senior U.S. diplomat said in Moscow. Policymakers are closely watching how Putin uses his now-undisputed hammerlock over the Duma and his alliance with two nationalist parties that captured one out of every five votes Sunday.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is among a small group of politicians and analysts who have openly challenged the administration to be tougher with Putin. McCain spoke of "a creeping coup against the forces of democracy and market capitalism" and asserted that "it's time to face unpleasant facts about Russia."
"The new authoritarianism in Russia is more than a test of America's ability to defend universal values that have taken shallow root since the Soviet empire collapsed. It presents a fundamental challenge to American interests across Eurasia," McCain said on the Senate floor.
The emerging U.S. relationship with Russia is taking on some traits of U.S.-China relations, where presidential administrations with few exceptions have tended to look past policies that diminished civil rights and freedom to preserve a positive working relationship. Apart from one year during the Clinton administration, China's poor human rights record has not been linked explicitly to the broader agenda.
Last week's visit to Washington by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao illustrated the approach, according to many analysts. Bush, with Wen next to him in the Oval Office, warned the leaders of Taiwan not to take unilateral steps that might provoke the government of mainland China. The comment came when Bush was asked about Taiwan's plans to hold a referendum calling on China to remove missiles aimed at the island, which has angered China.
Bush's comments infuriated U.S. neoconservatives and other Taiwan supporters who accused him of hypocrisy -- and undermining democratic Taiwan -- while he demands greater human freedoms in the Middle East.
"I think they will increasingly do with Russia what they are now doing with the China account, where relations with Taiwan, doing something about North Korea and managing the trade surplus are front and center," said Coit Blacker, a Stanford University professor and Clinton administration policy adviser. "You say good things about one another. You don't tear each other down. In other venues and other times, you go to those more sensitive issues."
In foreign policy, Russia has continued to work more closely with the United States on the biggest issues, particularly in applying joint diplomatic pressure on Iran and North Korea. And yet Russia has also been taking a more muscular stance toward U.S. involvement in its own neighborhood, particularly Moldova, Georgia and Central Asia.
Russia recently opened a military base in the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan, just miles from a U.S.-operated base used to support the war in Afghanistan. Moscow bristled at what it considers American interference in Moldova, where a Russian-brokered deal to resolve a long-standing separatist dispute in Transdniestr recently fell apart.
And Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov accused the United States last week of secretly helping to orchestrate the ouster of Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze, naming U.S. Ambassador Richard M. Miles as the main agent. Ivanov traveled to Tbilisi last month to mediate between Shevardnadze and the opposition forces that ultimately pushed him out.
Inside the Bush administration, some longtime Russia watchers, including U.S. Ambassador Alexander Vershbow, have been pressing for a toughened U.S. policy. Meanwhile, an emerging debate within Republican circles spilled into the open after Khodorkovsky's Oct. 25 arrest. He was charged with tax evasion and fraud, but Putin critics and Bush administration officials view the case as a Kremlin-orchestrated political attack on a powerful business figure who has presented himself as a reformer.
Richard Perle, an influential Pentagon adviser, said Russia should be thrown out of the G-8, the club of the world's biggest industrialized nations. In an October interview with The Washington Post, Perle said the administration should take a tougher line with Putin and ban Russia from receiving reconstruction contracts in Iraq. Bush officially denied access to contracts Dec. 5.
Bush, who raised his concerns to Putin about Russia's commitment to the rule of law after Khodorkovsky's arrest, made clear his frustration with the Duma campaign in a conversation last week, a State Department official said. In the same conversation, however, he asked for Russia's help in reducing Iraq's $120 billion debt.
U.S. officials say they have little leverage, but hope to deter Putin, a former KGB officer, from misusing his authority with warnings that such action could hinder needed foreign investment, limit opportunities for U.S. collaboration and weaken Russia's chances for membership in the World Trade Organization.
"We expected more," said a senior administration official frustrated with the Duma campaign. "You expect countries in a post-communist transition to make progress, for God's sake."
Baker reported from Moscow.
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