Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

Vladimir Putin steps out

The Economist

NEXT week Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama will meet again. In July 2009, the only time the two have met before, Mr Putin—then Russia’s prime minister, now its president—gave the American president an earful on the insults Russia had suffered from America. Mr Putin thinks that the conciliatory steps he took in his first term, especially after September 11th 2001, encountered American aggression: the “orange” revolution in Ukraine, Western support for Georgia’s Mikheil Saakashvili, a missile-defence system. As Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, says, Mr Putin is “sincerely anti-American,” not because of his KGB past, but because of “his experiences with Bush-era America”.

The “reset” by the Obama administration in early 2009 was meant to respond to this by letting bygones be bygones. Mr Obama and his advisers, who included the present American ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul, hoped that the reset would return the focus of relations to the countries’ shared interests. It coincided with some achievements: a new treaty reducing nuclear arsenals, greater co-operation on sanctions against Iran, an agreement to allow supplies for the war in Afghanistan to pass through Russia and Central Asia. The then Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, has even described the past three years as “the best period in US-Russia relations in history”.

But is it over? It was never clear if Moscow really believed in the premise of the reset. For many in the Russian foreign-policy establishment, says Angela Stent of Georgetown University, the reset was a one-sided “course correction,” in which Washington came to understand that it had not been treating Moscow properly. Moreover, Mr Putin cannot resist—now, as ever—forceful and confrontational gestures, such as his hostile speech at a security conference in Munich in 2007 or his attempt to blame Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, for the winter protests in Moscow. Changes in bilateral relations have been largely cosmetic. And that has added to the frustration over, for example, Mr Putin’s backing for Syria’s government or a senior Russian general’s statement that the country did not rule out the possibility of a nuclear first strike against missile-defence sites.

The spirit of co-operation that the reset was supposed to engender is being tested by the grim news from Syria and fresh talks on Iran’s nuclear programme in Moscow next week, as well as by the meeting between Mr Putin and Mr Obama on the margins of the G20 summit in Mexico. The most immediate issue is Syria. The Americans and Europeans want Russia to support a managed transition, in which President Bashar Assad would leave power but some of the underlying structures linked to his rule would remain in place. Yet Moscow is resistant to anything that resembles regime change, and is also more pessimistic about what might follow Mr Assad. Moreover Russia’s continued intransigence on Syria, says Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group, has value merely by giving the Kremlin a central part in resolving the crisis. The Russians know that if they give in to Western pressure on Syria “their role deflates considerably”, as the situation would no longer be under their control.