Washington sours on Putin after Ukraine vote

Washington Post/Peter Baker | December 13 2004

WASHINGTON – The political crisis in Ukraine has touched off a fresh debate inside the White House and foreign policy offices over how President Bush should handle Russian President Vladimir Putin’s increasingly authoritarian rule at home and assertive presence abroad, according to administration officials.

The relationship between Bush and Putin had been strained by the Kremlin’s crackdown on political opposition, but it has taken a turn for the worse over the fraud-ridden presidential election in next-door Ukraine unleashed an angry torrent of Cold War-style rhetoric from Moscow.

Putin denounced the U.S. “dictatorship” in international relations, accused the West of acting like a “kind but strict uncle in a pith helmet” lecturing Russia and ridiculed Bush’s plans for elections in Iraq next month. The tone has surprised some on the Bush team, according to officials, and demonstrated that Putin might be evolving from a partner into a foreign policy headache for Bush.

For an administration facing complex challenges in Iraq and the rest of the Mideast, friction with Russia represents an unwelcome distraction. The administration says it has improved cooperation with Moscow on terrorism and nonproliferation, and Bush does not want to jeopardize that, according to some aides.

“Clearly everybody in Washington is getting more and more concerned about where our friend is going,” said a senior U.S. official who asked not to be named out of diplomatic sensitivity. In the past, he said, “it was a manageable situation. Now with the very angry response on their part, the question is: Is this just letting off steam? … Or is this a real turn in Putin’s approach to us?”

The widening rift between Washington and Moscow represents a deterioration in ties since Bush met Putin in 2001 and declared that he had looked into the former KGB officer’s soul and found a friend. Bush invited the Russian to his Texas ranch and Camp David, and affectionately called Putin “Pootie-poot.”

The friendship eased the way for the United States to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, expand NATO into the former Soviet Baltic republics and dispatch troops to Central Asia as a staging area for the war in Afghanistan.

Bush began seeing Putin through a different prism a year ago, according to administration officials, after Russian authorities arrested oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had been financing opposition parties and impressed many by reforming his once-notorious business practices.

The tension increased this fall when Putin eliminated election of governors and independent members of parliament after the terrorist strike on a school in the southern Russian town of Beslan.

Bush raised the issue of Putin’s concentration of power with the Russian president last month during a private lunch in Santiago, Chile, where both were on hand for a multinational economic summit. After Bush expressed his concerns, U.S. officials said, Putin launched into a lengthy defense reaching deep into Russian history to justify his tough hand.

If Bush got nowhere on democracy, aides said he won a significant concession from Putin on Iraqi debt that day, demonstrating the delicate balance the White House is trying to strike. Russia had been holding out on a plan to forgive Iraqi obligations. But a day after having lunch, Bush aides said, Putin said he had decided to go along with the Iraqi debt plan.

“We’ve tried to cultivate a good relationship, and it’s allowed us to work on a lot of real issues,” said a senior administration official who defended the Russia policy. “We’re sort of evaluating it all the time. Whether we’ll sit down and do a systematic evaluation, probably at some point. But the feeling is this is a policy that’s working.” If such a review results in a change, he added, it would be “a sort of course correction.”

Other advisers consider that insufficient. “Clearly we don’t have a very coherent Russia policy at the moment, a comprehensive one, and if we did have one, it’s rapidly become inadequate in light of recent developments,” said Richard N. Perle, a former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon advisory panel. “One of the issues the administration is going to have to deal with is, what does the president see when he looks into Putin’s soul again?”

Advisers said Bush no longer harbors illusions about Putin’s soul. “The president gets it, and this would be true for over a year,” said another U.S. official who did not want to be identified.

Still, one adviser who requested anonymity to speak more candidly, said Bush likes Putin and worries that it would be counterproductive to confront the Russian too publicly. Bush needs to find a way to address the situation, he said, without becoming shrill and alienating Putin.

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