Russian Relations Under Scrutiny

The pressure on the administration will grow as the summit approaches. A Council on Foreign Relations task force led by two former vice presidential nominees, Republican Jack Kemp and Democrat John Edwards, plans to issue a critical report on Russia next month. At the same time, Bush needs Putin's help at the U.N. Security Council next month when it takes up Iran's nuclear program, and aides believe Moscow has been a constructive partner on this issue.

Russia has exacerbated concerns with recent actions. The Kremlin enacted a law restricting non-governmental organizations, closed some human rights groups and accused others of being fronts for foreign spies. Moscow also briefly cut off natural gas to Ukraine in a politically charged dispute that alarmed the rest of Europe, which gets a quarter of its gas from Russia.

Rice spoke out against those moves but has also tried to temper the criticism. On CBS's "Face the Nation" two weeks ago, she called the NGO law and the energy pressure "a problem" while saying that the United States and Russia now have "probably the best relations" in a long time.

"We have a choice," she said. "We can say, 'All right, it's all gone bad in Russia and, therefore, we're just going to go back to the old days and isolate them from these institutions, like the NATO-Russia Council or the G-8.' Or we can continue to say to the Russians, 'Yes, we want you in these institutions, but we expect behavior that is consistent with the values of those institutions.' "

Other administration officials have been sharper in public comments lately. Negroponte told Congress that Putin's actions suggest that "Russia could become a more inward-looking and difficult interlocutor for the United States over the next several years." In separate testimony, Fried warned that Russia is "backsliding on democracy."

Yet Bush in his budget this month proposed further slashing money for democracy programs in Russia from $44.2 million to $31.6 million while canceling Voice of America's Russian-language radio programming that for decades promoted Western values in Russia.

Putin has rejected criticism from the West in tough terms, dismissing it as a Cold War mentality. "There are devoted Sovietologists who do not understand what is happening in our country, do not understand the changing world," Putin said at a news conference last month. "They deserve a very brief response: 'To hell with you.' "

As U.S. and European officials consider what to do, they find few attractive options. None of the G-8 members plans to boycott the summit, but in preliminary meetings envoys in Moscow have been pushing Russia to recognize its image problem in the West and make the St. Petersburg gathering meaningful.

Russia has set energy security as the theme of the summit, a choice seen as ironic in Europe, given the gas dispute with Ukraine. France wants to pressure Moscow to finally ratify the Energy Charter Treaty of 1994, a set of binding rules governing energy cooperation, including guaranteeing freedom of energy transit through pipelines.

In Washington, U.S. officials are discussing ways of expressing concerns about Russian democracy in advance of the summit. Among the possibilities: a comprehensive and blunt speech by a senior official, possibly Rice, laying out more explicitly the U.S. view of Russia's direction. Or perhaps a gathering of human rights, democracy and other civil society groups either inside Russia or outside the country to showcase U.S. support for those under pressure from the Kremlin.

Aslund suggested the other seven leaders of the G-8 meet elsewhere in Europe without Putin before the summit to demonstrate concern over Russia. "The U.S. administration is thinking that it needs to do something," he said, "but it doesn't know what yet."