US President headed for talks with Putin in Moscow

US President stop in Latvia en route to Moscow to celebrate 60th anniversary of the end of World War II.
He is headed for talks with President Vladimir Putin which is likely to be strained, over his calls for greater democracy in Russia.

Bush flew in from the Netherlands, where he paid tribute to the soldiers who died to free Europe from the Nazis and said a new generation was working to bring liberty to the Middle East.

Bush will be among more than 50 world leaders at a Red Square parade on Monday to pay homage to the huge part played by the Soviet Union in the defeat of Nazi Germany 60 years ago.

Bush is trying not to alienate Russia, which sees his stop as a sign of increased meddling in its neighbourhood. On the one hand, Bush is nudging Moscow to acknowledge the pain that decade of Soviet occupation caused Latvia and its Baltic neighbours. On the other, he is urging Latvia to give respect to its many Russian residents.

“I love the fact that you’re a free nation and willing to speak out so clearly for freedom,” Bush said.
“I admire your country’s courage,” Bush told president Vaira Vike-Freiberga.

In a reflection of America’s popularity, Vike-Freiberga presented the president with the Three-Star Order, the nation’s top medal, calling him a “signal fighter of freedom and democracy in the world.”

The two leaders also laid wreaths at the Freedom Monument, a towering obelisk symbolising anti-Soviet resistance in Latvia’s struggle for independence.

“V-E Day marked the end of fascism, but not the end of oppression. The captivity of millions in central and eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history,” Bush said.

The White House hopes Bush’s high-profile dive into the decades-old dispute will encourage the Russians to confront a dark spot in their history, in which the end of World War II in Europe saw the Baltics merely trade Nazi domination for communist rule.

Bush tried once before, when he met Russian president Vladimir Putin in Slovakia in February, to convince the Russian leader that resolving tensions with the Baltics is in his best interest.”You need to work with these young democracies. I explained to him that it’s best that there be democracies on his border,” Bush said he told Putin.

Bush, however, acknowledged that the United States and Britain share a portion of blame for the Baltics’ pain. The 1945 Yalta agreement that carved up post-World War II Europe was forged by Soviet leader Josef Stalin, US president Franklin D Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Russian president Vladimir Putin, in writing in a newspaper on Saturday, reiterated that his country will not answer the demands of Baltic States to repent for years of Soviet domination.

“Our Baltic neighbours continue to demand a sort of ‘repentance’ by Russia,” Putin wrote. “I would like to underscore that such pretensions are useless.”

He suggested that in 1989 the Supreme Soviet had already made amends, giving a “judicial and moral appreciation” of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany that led to the Soviet role in the Baltics.

Moscow insists the three Baltic states—Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania—willingly joined the Soviet Union on the basis of the pact.