By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 5, 2007

The secretaries of state and defense and a squadron of other U.S. officials head to Moscow next week for a series of top-level meetings. They will discuss missile defense, a conventional forces treaty and the next step in nuclear arms cuts.

Not on the official agenda -- the future of Russian democracy.

In watching Russia's slide toward authoritarianism, the Bush administration once considered the ultimate test to be whether President Vladimir Putin voluntarily gave up power in 2008 as promised. But this week Putin shrugged off U.S. warnings and signaled that he plans to keep power by becoming prime minister, once again surprising an administration that has now all but abandoned hopes of influencing Russia's internal direction.

Some administration officials had assumed Putin would at least give up any formal leadership role out of a desire to avoid an international backlash. "We didn't really think through the possibility of him staying on in this kind of high-profile position," said a senior official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic issues.

Yet Putin's plans have only underscored the administration's emerging conclusion that it is powerless to prevent the Kremlin's retreat from democracy and reinforced a gloomy resignation about where Russia is headed. "What are we supposed to do?" asked another frustrated official. "One shouldn't exaggerate our ability to shape the future of Russian politics."

The prospect of Putin's remaining in charge in Moscow in whatever position after next year's Russian presidential election would cement one of the greatest U.S. foreign policy setbacks of the Bush era and could trigger a "Who lost Russia?" debate in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign. Instead of the democratic ally Bush envisioned after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Russia has become a challenge and an embarrassment for a president who made the spread of democracy a central mission of his administration.

"That was the red line -- the upcoming '08 election," said Andrew C. Kuchins, director of Russian studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and one of a group of Western scholars who just returned from a meeting with Putin in Moscow. "But I have a feeling the red line has either moved or it's evaporated. Whatever hope people had for democracy in Russia in the near term two or three years ago, that's really changed. And there's just nothing we can do about it."

The discouragement stems from a fundamental miscalculation of Putin's motives in backing the U.S. operations in Afghanistan after Sept. 11, according to current and past officials. "People read too much into the post-9/11 support," said Angela E. Stent, the Russia officer at the National Intelligence Council from 2004 to 2006. "That support was there because the Taliban was also their enemy. And we mistook that for something else."

So Bush is recalibrating expectations for the relationship and has essentially stopped putting much pressure on Putin about democracy. The two had testy, closed-door discussions on Russian democracy in Chile in 2004 and in Slovakia in 2005. Vice President Cheney delivered a blistering speech on the rollback of political freedoms in Russia in 2006. But in recent months, according to aides, the issue has come up only as a formality, if at all.

When Bush invited Putin to his family's compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, in July, the president made no public mention of democracy. Asked by a reporter how concerned he was about shrinking liberty in Russia, Bush talked instead about how much he trusts Putin. By the time they met again, on the sidelines of an Asian economic summit in Australia last month, the issue did not come up at all in their public comments.

After Putin this week effectively outlined his plan to remain in power, U.S. officials said, no special meetings were held within the administration to discuss what to do, no action memos were drafted with options. Bush did not call Putin to seek an explanation or publicly express concern, leaving it to spokesmen to say that "this is ultimately a matter for the people of Russia to decide," as White House press secretary Dana Perino put it.

Instead, during interagency meetings on Russia this week, the Bush team is focusing on areas where it hopes to make progress during next week's talks. At least half a dozen officials from the White House, Pentagon and State Department fly to Moscow early in the week to lay groundwork for an end-of-the-week summit between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and their Russian counterparts.

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."