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Rice Asks Russia to Recognize U.S. Interests and Ties With Post-Soviet States The United States urges Russia to recognize that the U.S. has legitimate interests and relationships with countries that once were part of the Soviet Union, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a news conference in Washington. Rice said that in her opinion the U.S. has a “relationship with Russia that is beneficial to both sides and that is workable on many issues”. “If I take something like Iran, the Russians are not tactically precisely where we are; however, they did vote ultimately for the Board of Governors resolution, they did vote for the presidential statement that took place. I think they recognize that Iran is not being responsive to the demands of the international community. You see it in their statements. And I know how hard they work on this issue,” Rice said. “What we ask of the Russians is really three things: The first is that they act responsibly on the big issues of the day like Iran and Middle East peace and so forth; secondly, that they recognize that we have legitimate interests and relationships with countries that are in their neighborhood even if those countries were once part of the Soviet Union. And I know it is sometimes difficult. You know, there are suspicions sometimes of our relations with, for instance, Ukraine. But of course, Ukraine is an independent country. That’s not going to change and it’s going to have good relations with the United States. We also want it to have good relations with Russia. But they are difficult and sensitive issues in this period of transition. ”The third is that I think if there is an area where I think there’s more disappointment than on the foreign policy side where I think these are sort of natural differences between states, and by the way we don’t have identical policies on some of these issues even with some of our closest allies, but it’s really on the internal dimension of Russian development. And there the jury is out about where Russia is going to end up. There have been some setbacks. The press is not very free, particularly the electronic media. The judiciary doesn’t appear to be very independent, at least when you get to higher-profile cases. I was reading a statistic that Russian citizens win 80 percent of their court cases against the government. So there is something going on there that is different than in Soviet times. Third, probably the biggest problem is the concentration of power in the Kremlin. It’s very hard to protect democratic process and practice if you don’t have countervailing forces in a society. And there’s no doubt that the presidency is incredibly strong at the expense of all of the other institutions, whether it’s the press or the legislature or the judiciary or the press — or the civil society,“ Rice said. The U.S. official also noted that she had ”good personal relations with Sergey Lavrov, with the Defense Minister Sergey Ivanov. The President has a good relationship with Putin. But that piece of it is troubling. And you asked about my own background. I think for somebody like me who has watched Russian history, in which the tendency has been to swing between chaos and authoritarianism and never to kind of find that middle place, that’s what one would hope for for Russia, that it finds that middle place. And it’s not the Soviet Union. There are a lot of positive trends, but there are also some negative trends that have set in.“ ---------------------------------------------------
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