Obama Lauds Putin’s ‘Extraordinary Work’ in Visit to Mend Ties

By Hans Nichols and Roger Runningen

July 7 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. President Barack Obama lauded Prime Minister Vladimir Putin for his service to Russia, continuing a three-day push to overcome the animosities of the George W. Bush era.

“I am aware of not only the extraordinary work you have done on behalf of the Russian people in your previous role as prime minister -- as president -- but in your current role as prime minister,” Obama told Putin after more than an hour of talks at the premier’s residence near Moscow.

Obama and Putin’s protégé and successor Dmitry Medvedev reached agreements yesterday on nuclear arms and Afghanistan, which Obama said marked a “new start” in relations between the two nuclear superpowers. The two leaders called for a reduction of atomic warheads by as much as a third, while Russia also agreed to allow the transit of U.S. arms shipments to troops fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Relations had reached a post-Cold War low under the last U.S. administration because of disagreements over the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a proposed U.S. missile shield in Europe and Russia’s war with Georgia.

While Obama, 47, and Medvedev, 43, “had a symbolically successful day” yesterday, the U.S. president’s meeting with Putin, 56, was “key” to the relationship because Putin is still the dominant political figure in Russia, said Andrew Kuchins, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

‘Ability to Charm’

Most Russians believe Medvedev is controlled by Putin, a poll showed last month. Sixty-eight percent of respondents in a Levada Center poll said Putin controls Medvedev, while 19 percent said the president acts independently.

“Obama’s ability to charm is his greatest strength and Putin is not a guy that can be charmed,” Kuchins said late yesterday.

After four hours of meetings in the Kremlin yesterday Obama told reporters that he and Medvedev, a fellow lawyer by training, had succeeded in their goal to “reset relations” between the U.S. and Russia. “After less than six months of collaboration, we have done exactly that,” Obama said.

That represented a 180-degree turn from Bush’s first meeting with Putin, then Russia’s president, at a summit in Slovenia in 2001. Bush told reporters then that he had “looked the man in the eye” and found Putin trustworthy, adding: “I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

Cash Stockpile

In his eight years in the Kremlin, Putin consolidated political power, tamed the country’s new billionaires and led Russia’s resurgence in international affairs. Russia’s economy, contracting now for the first time in more than a decade, grew an average of 7 percent a year under Putin, as the price of oil, the country’s main export earner, climbed from $20 a barrel in 2000 to more than $100 when he stepped down in May 2008.

Russia amassed the world’s third-largest cash stockpile, increasing 30-fold to almost $600 billion before the war with Georgia a year ago. Putin also turned OAO Gazprom, the world’s biggest gas producer, into a geopolitical weapon as the state- run company’s market value surged from less than $5 billion to more than $330 billion.

Today, Putin, a KGB colonel during the Cold War, returned Obama’s compliment.

“With you we link all our hopes for the furtherance of relations between our two countries,” Putin said. “We are very glad to see you here and welcome you here in Russia.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Hans Nichols in Moscow at hnichols2@bloomberg.net ; Roger Runningen in Moscow at rrunningen@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: July 7, 2009 02:51 EDT

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