Bush to push democracy to Putin

Published: 10:10PM Thursday February 24, 2005 Source: Reuters

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US President George Bush will strive to sell to Vladimir Putin his second-term vision of democracy at a summit on Thursday that could bring a new, chillier tone to US-Russian relations.
   
The two leaders, who call each other by their first names, will talk for at least 90 minutes in the afternoon on issues ranging from Iran's nuclear ambitions to what the West sees as Putin's backsliding on democracy.
   
"There has been a rise in undemocratic Russia at home and anti-democratic Russia abroad," Bruce Jackson, head of Project on Transitional Democracies, a pro-democracy group active in the former Soviet Union, told a conference on the eve of the summit.
   
"This is a fundamental change in Europe in this phase," Jackson, who has close ties to the Bush White House said.
   
Bush's meeting with Putin will follow three days of fence-mending with European leaders who opposed the war in Iraq in an attempt to revitalise the frayed transatlantic alliance.
   
In a sign both sides were finally putting past disagreements behind them, Bush and German German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, a leading critic of the war, vowed on Wednesday to rebuild their partnership.
   
Bush begins his day by meeting leaders of Slovakia and will speak from a town square to praise the 12-year-old country, once part of Czechoslovakia, as an example of democracy and the peace it can bring. He is the first US president to visit. 
   
Growing concern
   
The Bush-Putin meeting comes amid growing concern in the West about moves by the Russian president seen as backsliding on democracy.
   
Western and Russian civil rights campaigners accuse Putin of restricting democracy by abolishing the election of provincial governors, pursuing a legal vendetta against the Yukos oil company and tightening the Kremlin's grip on the media.
   
They also fear he is trying to stifle democratic changes across the ex-Soviet bloc, with Russian reluctance to accept free elections in Ukraine often cited as the latest example.
   
Putin's defence has been that Russia must adapt democracy to its own conditions and will not allow the issue to be used by other countries for their foreign policy goals.
   
A senior Bush administration official, pointing to Putin's statements to Bush in previous meetings that the Russian people have a long history of strong czars, was sceptical.
   
"I always get suspicious when people put any adjective in front of democracy - People's Democracy, Proletarian Democracy, Aryan Democracy, Managed Democracy," he said.
   
Bush set the tone for his meeting with Putin by saying in a key speech in Brussels that to make progress as a European nation, Russia must "renew a commitment to democracy and the rule of law".
   
In the same tone, he expressed concern about press freedom in Russia and differences between Moscow and ex-Soviet countries trying to build closer ties with the West such as the Baltic states, the new NATO members Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
   
The challenge for Bush is, however to get the message across without causing a rift that could damage relations in other areas, such as efforts to convince North Korea and Iran to give up ambitions for nuclear weapons.
   
"Making Russia more democratic is a wish but Bush is probably aware that Russians will do only as much on that as they want," said Janusz Reiter, head of Warsaw-based Centre for International Relations. "There is not a lever they (the US) can pull on that one."
    
It will be the 12th meeting between the two leaders and comes nearly four years after their first, when Bush declared he had looked into Putin's eyes and seen the soul of a man he could trust.
   
The relationship took a dive when Putin sided with opponents of the Iraq war. Recently the Russian leader has irritated Washington by going along with surface-to-air missile sales to Syria and declaring Iran is not developing a nuclear weapon.

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