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G8 absence threatens US-Russian rapport

Financial Times

When the G8 leaders gather at Camp David on Friday, one will be missing. Vladimir Putin, who was scheduled to have a post-summit meeting with Barack Obama, US president, sent his Dmitry Medvedev, prime minister, at the last minute instead.

The reason for his absence is still hotly debated in Moscow – almost no one believes the officially proffered reason that Mr Putin wants to stay in Moscow to interview prospective cabinet officials.

The cancellation casts a sudden pall over US-Russian relations, especially in the wake of Mr Putin’s aggressively anti-western campaign for the presidency, which he won on March 4. He barely let a public appearance go by without accusing the US of secretly plotting to overthrow him.

His absence seems to realise the worst predictions that the re-election of Mr Putin would mean the end of the tentative thaw in relations known as the “reset”, described in March by outgoing president Mr Medvedev as “the best three years in Russia-US relations in a decade”. Those may indeed now be over.

“The beginning of the Obama-Putin relationship doesn’t look optimistic,” said Sergei Rogov, director of the Institute for US and Canadian Studies in Moscow, who declined to guess at the reasons for Putin’s absence, underlining the extent to which even senior experts are puzzled by the Kremlin’s Byzantine ways.
Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, the think-tank, said: “The [US-Russia] relationship is certainly wrong-footed at this point.