Russia-US summit: Love turns pragmatic

The Bush-Putin honeymoon may be over, but Moscow seems happy to still have a ‘pragmatic and nonconfrontational’ relationship with Washington, writes Sergei Borisov in Transitions Online.

When George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin shook hands in Bratislava, the Slovak capital, on 24 February, it was the 11th time the U.S. and Russian presidents had met. All of those meetings had been warm, friendly affairs; many of them had been more than that. Bush has variously said he has looked into Putin’s eyes and seen his soul, and that Putin is a good friend and a “guy” with whom one could have a good time. In September 2003, he topped off the effusions by saying, “I love him, believe it or not.” 

But this time Putin was coming to a summit against a backdrop of heavy criticism in the United States and in Russia itself. In Russia, his reforms of the benefits system had pulled vast numbers of protesting pensioners out onto the streets since early January in a so-called chintz revolution. Putin’s long-serving former prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, had just attacked Putin’s record on basic rights and indicated that he would run in the presidential elections in 2008. And as Putin headed to Bratislava, the trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of the oil giant Yukos, was just starting in Moscow, while in Houston, a U.S. court was set to rule on whether the Russian state’s foreclosure on Yukos assets was legal. 

One of the most controversial episodes in Putin’s rule–raising questions about the rule of law in Russian business–therefore featured prominently in the international press at a time when U.S. politicians in the White House and on Capitol Hill are expressing increasing concern about the state of Russian democracy. Days before the Bratislava summit, Bush told EU leaders in Brussels that “the United States and all European countries should place democratic reform at the heart of their dialogue with Russia” and that he would ask Putin to renew his “commitment to democracy and the rule of law.” 

Russian analysts expected the meeting of the two presidents to be a “summit of unpleasant questions.” 

To read the article in full, visit the Transitions Online website.