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 already been strained by the Kremlin's crackdown on political opposition at home, but it has taken a turn for the worse in recent days as the dispute over the fraud-ridden presidential election in next-door Ukraine unleashed an angry torrent of Cold War-style rhetoric from Moscow.
Presidents Bush and Vladimir Putin, who met in 2001, at Camp David in 2003, long after Bush said he had looked into Putin's soul and found a friend.
(Charles Dharapak -- AP)
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Bristling at perceived interference in his back yard, 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 national elections in Iraq next month. The tone has surprised some on the Bush team, according to officials, and vividly demonstrated that Putin may be evolving from a first-term partner into a foreign policy headache for Bush in his second term.
For an administration facing complex challenges in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, friction with Russia represents an unwelcome distraction. The administration believes it has improved cooperation with Moscow on terrorism and nonproliferation, and Bush does not want to jeopardize that, according to some aides. But other advisers argue that a president promoting the "march of freedom" elsewhere in the world needs to do more to head off a retreat in Russia.
"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?"
Bush and his team are evaluating their approach to Putin. While Bush has avoided responding in kind to Putin's inflammatory language, some of his advisers believe there will be ramifications. "We're not going to write him off," the senior official said. But "people aren't able to turn the cheek to all this sharp rhetoric."
The widening rift between Washington and Moscow represents a dramatic deterioration in ties since Bush first met Putin in 2001 and famously 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, while around the White House he referred to Putin by the affectionate nickname of "Pootie-poot."
The backslapping George-and-Vladimir 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. Their rapport even smoothed over fallout from the war in Iraq; when it came to European countries that opposed the Iraq war, Bush took an approach that his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, reportedly termed, "punish France, ignore Germany and forgive Russia."
But 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 in Washington 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.
"It's a challenge" for Bush, said Michael McFaul, a Russia scholar at the Hoover Institution. "It's a problem he would prefer not to have to deal with. . . . If I were him, I would be very disappointed. He invested a lot in the guy and a lot in the relationship. Putin's not only not meeting him halfway, he's embarrassing him."
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, and Bush pushed Putin on it at the Santiago lunch and then again at a dinner event. The next day, Bush aides said, Putin approached and 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. He acknowledged that there is "a narrow debate" in the administration that could lead to a review of the 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. "What really triggered it was the Khodorkovsky thing. Here was a guy who was in Washington right before" his arrest. "They took a guy who a lot of people had met and knew. From then on, the president started to get it."
Even some of the Putin defenders in Bush's circle who thought the Russian leader was a pragmatist have revised their views. "I give him the benefit of the doubt on many of these issues while the democratization people almost never do," said one adviser who requested anonymity to speak more candidly. "It is always depressing when they are right and those of us who had hoped for better are wrong."
Still, the adviser 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. "If somebody scolds him, how do you think he takes it?" the adviser asked. "Is that a constructive thing to do or not?"
That was the logic behind Bush's muted public reaction to the Russian attempts to install its favorite candidate in the Nov. 21 Ukrainian election runoff. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell publicly condemned the fraud committed in the campaign and warned of consequences to the relationship. Other U.S. officials contacted Putin aides as well.
But Bush chose not to pick up the telephone and call Putin, knowing that such a move would result in headlines that might anger the Russian leader even further. As the senior administration official defending the policy put it, "The president's gut feel is this isn't the kind of thing that will advance the things I'm talking about."
