May 22, 2002	Wednesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 8,1423

WASHINGTON: President Bush goes to Moscow this week intent on cementing a move from conflict to cooperation with Russia but also determined to press Russian President Vladimir Putin on arms transfers to Iran, Chechnya and other unfinished business, administration officials said.

Bush will be carrying a nuclear weapons treaty, in which the two countries will drastically reduce their nuclear warheads, and a pledge of closer relations between NATO and the faded superpower the western alliance was created to contain. The White House wants to dispense with most talk of armies and ideology in favor of themes such as counter-terrorism and economic reform during Bush’s talks with Putin.

Yet adapting the rules and habits of Europe to Russia’s tangled military and political bureaucracy will take time and more than a little cajoling, administration officials and analysts said.

Bush plans to ask Putin to block transfers of nuclear expertize and ballistic missile technology to Iran, the first time the two men will discuss in detail an issue that has long bedevilled US-Russian relations. The administration believes Russian companies and scientists are helping Iran, which Bush called a member of an “axis of evil” in January, develop weapons of mass destruction.

With Putin shackling the country’s media and prosecuting a war in Chechnya, US officials acknowledge the administration must choose how to blend its desire for warm relations with consternation at some of Putin’s actions and methods.

“We’ve decided we’re no longer going to be enemies. We’ve decided we’re going to be friends. But we haven’t decided what these friends are going to do together,” a State Department official said.

Another Russia specialist said the relationship is “something yet to be built by both sides.”

This will be Bush’s first trip to Russia, and the pomp quotient will be high. He will travel from formal meetings at the Kremlin and a dinner at Putin’s home to a tour of St. Petersburg, the grand canal city of Peter the Great. Bush will meet business leaders, encourage the beleaguered Russian media, consult with religious figures and speak to students on national television.

Much time has been set aside for one-on-one talks between Bush and Putin, meeting for the third time in 12 months. US advisers have concluded that Bush functions more effectively in a small, personal forum than reading from notes amid a large delegation. Bush feels a positive connection with Putin, saying of the former KGB officer when he met him last year, “I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

Even before they shake hands in Moscow, the two men will have reached agreement to cut strategic nuclear warheads by two-thirds by 2012.

Next month, the United States will formally exit the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty over Russian objections. The administration also raised Moscow’s hackles by dispatching troops to the former Soviet republic of Georgia to fight terrorism. In Central Asia, the U.S. presence is growing alongside the US military bases that Putin permitted after Sept 11.

On missile defence, the White House has offered a limited cooperative role to a Russian government deeply frustrated with US plans to increase its military strength, especially at a time when Moscow has little money to spare.

Despite progress in the US-Russia relationship, even an administration official who tends toward optimism conceded, “It’s Russia. You don’t know what the future is.”—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service.