Bush, Putin at odds over NATO expansion plans
BUCHAREST, Romania — President Bush, fresh from securing full NATO support for his missile defense plans for Europe and a pledge to later admit former Soviet republics, has plenty to discuss with Russia's Vladimir Putin.
Bush saw the outgoing Russian president today here at a NATO-Russia Council meeting amid new Washington-Moscow tensions.
In all, Bush was to be face-to-face with Putin at least three times in three days, wrapping up a leader-to-leader relationship that has lasted nearly a decade. With Putin leaving office next month, their meeting at Putin's vacation home at the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi on Saturday and Sunday will likely be their last as leaders.
Bush went into the first of the discussions a day after having won NATO backing to install a missile shield in the former Soviet eastern European satellites of Poland and the Czech Republic over Russian objections.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called it a "breakthrough agreement" for the military alliance, and it was sugarcoated by the announcement of a U.S. deal with the Czech Republic to host a radar site vital to the missile defense system.
But Bush lost, at least for the moment, a highly public spat over opening the door to NATO membership to Ukraine and Georgia, which Putin vehemently opposes. Instead of the immediate start to that process that he wanted, Bush got a written commitment from the allies, including Germany and France, which shared Russian concerns, that the two nations will become NATO members at some point. Bush plans to continue to press the matter before his second term expires in January.
A senior Russian diplomat said NATO's pledge of eventual membership to Ukraine and Georgia had badly soured ties between the alliance and Moscow. "A culture of searching for solutions on the basis of taking mutual interests into account has been lost," Sergei Ryabkov, chief of the Russian Foreign Ministry's department for European cooperation, told reporters in Bucharest before the meeting between Putin and NATO's 26 leaders, including Bush.
Russia also remains deeply worried by the alliance's support for the U.S. missile shield.
"We can't sit aside and watch how they rubber-stamp decisions made by other people changing security situation for Russia," Ryabkov said.
Tensions even erupted over how the NATO-Russia meeting was conducted. The Kremlin's spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, complained that television coverage of the session ended before Putin spoke, denying the Russian leader a chance to speak publicly, unlike a NATO-Ukraine meeting earlier today.
But Ryabkov emphasized that Russia had something to offer NATO despite the differences. Moscow struck a deal to allow the military alliance to ship non-lethal freight across Russia to NATO forces fighting in Afghanistan. "We work in a pragmatic way and continue to cooperate with NATO in areas where our interests are close or coincide," Ryabkov said.
Both Bush and Putin are short-timers looking to burnish their legacies.
Rice said the two leaders were expected to produce "a strategic framework" to guide relations between Washington and Moscow under their successors. "Part of that has to be some discussion of missile defense," Rice said.
