Our New Best Friend?

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Given Russia's cooperation so far in the U.S. war in Afghanistan, including its sharing intelligence about al-Qaeda and the Taliban, Bush is apt to comply. He is also expected to gloss over Putin's authoritarian crackdown on his country's fledgling independent media, as well as his making the national legislature, the Duma, a totally servile body. "The things about Putin that Bush and Condi criticized during the campaign have only gotten worse in the past two years," says McFaul. "It's not like Putin's suddenly changed his ways at home."

Rice acknowledges the limits to the new relationship. "There are still some hard issues with the Russians," she says. The hardest, by far, is Moscow's refusal to stop supplying Iran which Bush identified as a member of the "axis of evil"--with know-how that the U.S. fears could be used in Tehran's drive to develop weapons of mass destruction. The Russians, who have been helping Iran build a civilian reactor in the southwestern town of Bushehr, vehemently insist they have imposed strict controls on their exports that rule out sharing any sensitive technology. American intelligence officials disagree, though they refuse to disclose their evidence.

To help Bush better understand the Russian mind, Rice recently gave him several books, including her favorite Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. The President is reading it now, but whether a novel about human weakness and the power of guilt will give him any clues on how to deal with his Russian counterpart isn't clear. More than likely, Bush will rely on the same instincts that told him in Slovenia that Putin was a man he could trust. After the visit, Bush aides expect the relationship between the two to grow stronger. Rice goes to great lengths to emphasize that Bush is not basing his Russia policy on his personal chemistry with Putin. But the distinction is hard to discern. After all, the next time Bush needs to talk to his friend in the Kremlin, that once mysterious former kgb agent, he will probably call Rice into the Oval Office and, using his pet nickname for the Russian leader, say, as he has in the past, "Get me Pootie-Poot on the phone!"