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U.S. Relationship With Russia Questioned

The Bush administration is quietly exploring ways of recalibrating U.S. policy toward Russia in the face of growing concerns about the Kremlin`s crackdown on internal dissent and pressure tactics toward its neighbors, according to senior officials and others briefed on the discussions. Critics charge that President Vladimir Putin`s upcoming leadership of the Group of 8 summit makes a mockery of the organization, and Sen. John McCain of Arizona is only one among others who have called for the United States to boycott the event.

The G-8 is supposed to be a club of the world`s leading industrial democracies, but by standard measurements, Russia is neither an industrial leader or a democracy. The administration is boxed in partly because of President Bush`s enthusiastic embrace of Putin when they met in 2001 and the American president declared he had gotten a sense of the Russian leader`s soul. Although Bush has since taken a less optimistic view, he has been unwilling to abandon Mr. Putin, especially after Russia allowed U.S. forces into Central Asia following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"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.`" Moscow recently closed the offices of some human rights groups operating in Russia, while the Kremlin accused others of being fronts for foreign espionage. The Russian Federation 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.