U.S. Hopes for Democracy in Russia Fade

The meetings are slated to address three issues: U.S. plans to build an anti-missile system in Eastern Europe, Russia's retaliatory decision to withdraw from the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe treaty and the future of nuclear arms control once the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, expires in 2009. Officials said that they expect Iran's nuclear program and proposed independence for Kosovo to come up on the sidelines.

The U.S. side is trying to arrange for Rice and Gates to meet with Putin, and aides said they might raise his political plans. But they conceded that it would not sway the Russians. "They're not going to be listening to us for a while, that's certainly true," said a senior official, who like the others asked not to be named. "But it doesn't mean you stop. We just have to be clear what we can achieve and what we cannot achieve."

In effect, it is a return to the more realpolitik "great power" policy toward Russia espoused by Rice in 1999 during Bush's first presidential campaign rather than the more idealistic "ending tyranny" agenda articulated by Bush in his 2005 inaugural address.

"They have given up," said Lilia Shevtsova, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center and author of "Russia -- Lost in Transition," a new book on the eras of Putin and Boris Yeltsin. "This is the failure of Bush politics. You cannot do anything because you cannot change policy at the end of the Bush era. You're totally helpless."

Putin's maneuvering also complicated the situation for the administration. Under the Russian constitution, Putin cannot run for a third consecutive term next year. But he said this week he would lead the slate of parliamentary candidates put forth by the pro-Kremlin United Russia and would consider becoming prime minister if the party wins and the next president is a "decent, effective and modern person." Given Putin's political dominance, United Russia seems certain to win December's parliamentary elections and his handpicked candidate seems certain to win the March presidential election.

Since Russia's president chooses the prime minister subject to parliamentary confirmation, Putin would be guaranteed the position if he wants it. What remains unclear is if his chosen president would formally transfer powers to the prime minister, simply serve as Putin's de facto puppet or actually resign at some point so Putin could ascend to the presidency again.

Because those scenarios would not necessarily violate the constitution, Putin could argue that he has done nothing wrong and lived up to his promise not to run for a third term, even though the bottom line would be a continued stranglehold on power. That is one reason that the Bush administration's public reaction this week was so muted. "I don't see what our hook would be to criticize it," one official said.

But the net result at the end of the Bush presidency seems likely to be a Russia that is anything but the democratic beacon once forecast by the West after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, much less the strong ally Bush thought he found after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"We need to have a reality check," said Stent, the former intelligence officer who heads the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University and was among the scholars who met with Putin recently. "The analogy that's often used is to China. We obviously have a lot of differences with China, but we don't expect that Chinese society is going to change overnight to look like ours."