Officials in Washington no longer see the Russian president as 'trustworthy', writes Conor O'Clery
After US president George W. Bush met Russian president Vladimir Putin in June 2001, he declared: "I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. I was able to get a sense of his soul." A few days later, he qualified this in an interview with the Wall Street Journal by adding the phrase "until he proves otherwise".
US officials now say that the Russian leader has proved otherwise and is not so straightforward and trustworthy. The rhetoric about Mr Putin has become sharply critical in US official circles in recent months. Mr Bush said on Tuesday that it was important that he raise Western concerns with the Russian leader at their summit in Bratislava today.
Analysts say that he has little choice: if he fails to affirm his commitment to freedom with Mr Putin by his side, it will signal that he is exercising a double standard.
Mr Bush has already this week aired complaints about the roll-back in democracy in Russia, about the Kremlin's attempts to impede democratic reform in Ukraine and Georgia, about the crushing of the media and the arrests of business figures. But raising such concerns with the expressionless Mr Putin, whose face, when challenged, becomes like a mask obscuring any glimpse of his soul, could cause the meeting to degenerate into a slanging match.
The Russian ambassador to Washington, Mr Yuri Ushakov, served warning of this yesterday. He said that Mr Putin was likely to raise his own concerns "about the situation in the United States and certain troubling aspects of Washington's policies".
The ambassador noted public criticism in Russia of "some of America's actions in certain regions of the world" and of "your electoral system". This has been taken to refer to the Iraq war, human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and the 2000 election fiasco in Florida.
The deteriorating tone of US-Russian exchanges was exemplified by the comment of a US official in yesterday's New York Times that he was "familiar with the whole Russian whine list". One item on the list is, however, a serious concern for Moscow and one that raises questions about American good faith in the relationship. This is the failure of the US Congress to repeal the Jackson-Vanik amendment to a 1974 trade agreement despite repeated White House promises. The amendment imposed US trade sanctions on the Soviet Union 30 years ago to force the Kremlin to allow Jewish emigration. Restrictions on Jewish emigration were lifted 15 years ago, but Jackson-Vanik remains in place and hampers Russian entry to the World Trade Organisation.
Mr Bush has undertaken to Mr Putin at every encounter since 2001 to ask Congress to lift the restrictions, but he has expended little political capital to do so. Now the mood against lifting the sanctions is hardening. In a policy paper, the Senate Republican majority in Washington encouraged Mr Bush to be tough with Mr Putin and to tell him that the Soviet-era sanctions will remain in place until he puts an end to Russia "backsliding" on democracy and the rule of law and until Russia ends its "meddlesome" role in neighbouring countries and adheres to international treaties. Republican senator John McCain and Democratic senator Joseph Lieberman have called on Mr Bush to exclude Russia from the meetings of the G8 group of industrialised nations.
The US-based Freedom House, which tracks the progress of political rights and civil liberties across the world, downgraded Russia from "partly free" to "not free" this year and asked Mr Bush, in a letter, to challenge Mr Putin's "authoritarian course". It advocated the creation of at least one independent television channel in Moscow and permission for UN officials investigating torture and disappearances to visit Chechnya.
The rising anti-Putin sentiment in the US has been exacerbated by Russian dealings with Iran and Syria. US Secretary of State Dr Condoleezza Rice publicly contradicted Mr Putin's assertion last week that Iran was not secretly developing nuclear weapons. Former Pentagon adviser Richard Perle said yesterday on MSNBC that Moscow's sale of weapons to Syria was "outrageous" and a "provocation".
Mr Ushakov said that Russia was aware of its shortcomings and said that the Bush-Putin meeting "should produce concrete results, but that any attempt to 'corner' Russia over political liberties and press freedoms would be 'counter-productive and doomed to failure'."
In written responses to the New York Times, the ambassador said there was no backsliding on Russia's "commitment to the market economy, to democracy, or to civil society and the rule of law". But what was "good for one country might not work elsewhere".