Bitter outburst by Putin a sign U.S.-Russian relations cooling

By Steven R. Weisman
The New York Times

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WASHINGTON — Three tumultuous years ago, President Bush memorably proclaimed that he had looked into the soul of Russian President Vladimir Putin and found a man with whom he could do business.

But if there is any soul-searching going on today in the Bush administration, it is over why the latest attacks by Chechen terrorists in Russia have deepened a recent estrangement between the two countries.

Despite the understandable horror after the massacre of schoolchildren and other attacks that have taken nearly 350 Russian lives in the past two weeks, administration officials were taken aback by the almost despairing tone of Putin as he lashed out at the United States last week for suggesting that Chechen demands needed to be addressed politically as well as militarily.

"Why don't you meet Osama bin Laden, invite him to Brussels or to the White House and engage in talks, ask him what he wants and give it to him so he leaves you in peace?" Putin was quoted as telling a group of Western visitors.

After that statement, Secretary of State Colin Powell hastened to declare that "there can be no justification for what happened in Russia" and "no compromise in this battle." The White House let it be known that Bush had telephoned his soul mate to express condolences.

Other officials, responding to Putin's complaint that the United States had granted asylum to a Chechen leader and had contacts with others, said that the asylum case was granted by the courts and that the U.S. government cut off even low-level contacts with Chechens two years ago.

While they moved quickly to address Putin's concerns, some administration officials concede that they nonetheless have growing doubts about the nature of his leadership.

And not just over the brutal crackdown on the rebels in Chechnya that seems not to be working, but also over other steps that hark back to a Russian authoritarianism of old: prosecution of dissenters and business leaders, fettering of the free press, distribution of Russian assets to cronies, meddling in the internal affairs of Georgia and other neighbors, and the country's peremptory cancellation last year of exploration deals with American oil companies.

"The Russians are sending very mixed signals right now," said a senior administration official.
 
"They're very ambivalent about their whole relationship with the West. Do they want to be a part of it? Not quite. Do they want to be against it? Not that either."

Former officials echoed that view. "Over the past couple of years, people in the U.S. government have had this nervous sense that the Putin policy in Chechnya might be wrong, but a suspicion that it might work," said Stephen Sestanovich, a top Russia hand in the Clinton administration.

"What the last two weeks have done is explode that idea. We're no longer worried that what Putin is doing is just unsavory or grotesque. It's just a failure."

At a time when the Bush administration has been pilloried for allegedly failing to work with allies, Bush and his aides have worked hard at courting Russia and can legitimately claim dividends.

Among them are cooperation on expanding NATO into Russia's front yard, on establishing a U.S. military presence in parts of the former Soviet Union, and in revising a Nixon-era treaty so it would allow U.S. pursuit of a national missile-defense system.

No less important, administration officials say, is cooperation in pressing Iran and North Korea to abandon nuclear-weapons programs. On Iraq, finally, Moscow complained about the war but made less trouble than it could have.

What is startling about this record is the range of criticism saying that Putin could have done a lot more for the United States on Iran, Iraq and North Korea, and that the administration has essentially given Putin and his team a pass by not voicing sufficient public criticism of his authoritarian streak.

Some of that criticism has come from neoconservatives who used to attack the Clinton administration for turning a blind eye to President Boris Yeltsin. One such critic, ironically, was Condoleezza Rice, then a Bush campaign adviser, who in 2000 wrote an article for Foreign Affairs charging that the Clinton administration had engaged in "happy talk" with the Kremlin while Yeltsin let his friends loot the Russian treasury.

Now, some of the sharpest criticism heard of the Bush administration is coming from Clinton-era officials whom Rice assailed four years ago. "We're pretending that the Russians are playing ball with us to a far greater extent than they actually are," Sestanovich said.

Said Richard Holbrooke, Clinton's ambassador to the United Nations: "They've given Putin a blank check."

Powell responded, during in a recent interview, that he has gone out of his way to put such issues on the table whenever he meets with Russian leaders, even writing a critical opinion piece in Izvestia last winter.

"Come on, now," he said. "There are problems in Russia that we have to deal with, but did anyone expect that Putin would suddenly listen to everything he's heard from outsiders? We have not been restrained in letting the Russians know where we think they need to change behavior and improve performance."

Still, there is anxiety about trends in Russia, based on long experience with the unpredictable nature of its erratic relationship with the West. The anxiety is coupled with a widespread view that the Chechen problem has no obvious solution, rooted as it is in aspirations for independence that date to the early days of the czarist empire, as much as in the toxic tendency of Islamic militants everywhere to employ the most extreme tactics.

There is a feeling among many that, as Putin suggested in his outburst last week, the United States can ill afford to lecture Putin on the need to reach political solutions after muscling its way into Iraq. But during a presidential campaign in which Bush is claiming that the United States is winning the war on terrorism, few people would say that Putin could now go to the Russian public and say the same thing.

Administration officials say they are determined to use the problems with Chechnya as an opportunity for more, not less, cooperation with Russia in areas like airline safety and the sharing of intelligence on terrorists. "We've got a lot of stuff that we can do, and we just need to keep working at it," said an official.

The officials also dismiss the idea that Bush, for all the talk of his famous looking into Putin's soul, has any illusions about the problems with Moscow.

"I can assure you, he gets it," said an administration official who has dealt with the president on this issue. "The fact is that the next American president, whether it's Bush or Kerry, is going to have to develop a constructive relationship with Moscow when all the trends are not good."