Putin?s Return Brings Rapid Chill to U.S.-Russia Ties

WASHINGTON ? Sitting beside President Obama this spring, the president of Russia gushed that ?these were perhaps the best three years of relations between Russia and the United States over the last decade.? Two and a half months later, those halcyon days of friendship look like a distant memory.

Gone is Dmitri A. Medvedev, the optimistic president who collaborated with Mr. Obama and celebrated their partnership in March. In his place is Vladimir V. Putin, the grim former K.G.B. colonel whose return to the Kremlin has ushered in a frostier relationship freighted by an impasse over Syria and complicated by fractious domestic politics in both countries.

The tension over Syria has been exacerbated by an accusation by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday that Russia is supplying attack helicopters to the government of President Bashar al-Assad as it tries to crush an uprising. Russia?s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, rejected the assertions on Wednesday, saying that Moscow was supplying only defensive weapons and countering that the United States was arming the region.

The back-and-forth underscored the limits of Mr. Obama?s ability to ?reset? ties between the two countries, as he resolved to do when he arrived in office. He has signed an arms control treaty, expanded supply lines to Afghanistan through Russian territory, secured Moscow?s support for sanctions on Iran and helped bring Russia into the World Trade Organization. But officials in both capitals noted this week that the two countries still operated on fundamentally different sets of values and interests.

The souring relations come as Mr. Obama and Mr. Putin are preparing to meet for the first time as presidents next week on the sidelines of a summit meeting in Mexico. With Mr. Obama being accused by Mitt Romney, his Republican presidential opponent, of going soft on Russia and Mr. Putin turning to anti-American statements in response to street protests in Moscow, the Mexico meeting is being seen as a test of whether the reset has run its course.

?We were already at a place with the Russians where we were about to move to a new phase,? said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser to Mr. Obama. ?A lot of this is can we continue to build on the initial steps we?ve taken with the Russians even as we?ve had differences emerge, most notably on Syria.?

Others see relations between the two countries more pessimistically. ?There is a crisis in the Russian-American relationship,? said Aleksei K. Pushkov, the hawkish head of Russia?s parliamentary foreign affairs committee. ?It is a crisis when the sides have to balance their interests but they cannot do so because their interests diverge. It is developing into some kind of long-term mistrust.?

The signs of that divergence have been there for a while but have seemed increasingly pronounced in recent months. Michael A. McFaul, a former Russia adviser to Mr. Obama, has been subjected to an unusual campaign of public harassment since arriving in Moscow as ambassador. A Russian general last month threatened pre-emptive strikes against American missile defense sites in Poland in the event of a crisis.

Reclaiming the presidency after a four-year interregnum wielding power as prime minister, Mr. Putin has responded to sustained demonstrations with a crackdown and accusations of American perfidy, singling out Mrs. Clinton. He snubbed Mr. Obama by skipping the annual Group of 8 summit meeting, hosted by the president at Camp David last month.

?The reset failed to change the underlying suspicion and distrust of America shared by a majority of Russians as well as Putin himself,? said Masha Lipman, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center. ?America is seen as a threat, an agent seeking to undermine Russia, to weaken it, to do harm to it. Russia always has to be on the alert, on the defensive.?

Adding to the tension have been moves in Congress to impose visa and banking restrictions on Russian officials implicated in human rights abuses. The bipartisan legislation, named for Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer whose corruption investigation led to his death in prison, passed a House committee last week and will be taken up by a Senate panel next week.

Ellen Barry contributed reporting from Moscow, and Thom Shanker from Washington.

Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=bd4fe8688c78b6ead99c03e3c71ce902

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