Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov arrives in Washington amid increasing tensions in US-Russia ties and skepticism among Moscow's allies about its membership in the G8. Lavrov is to meet Tuesday with President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, with energy issues, Iran's nuclear program and the Middle East expected to top the agenda.
His visit is taking place Monday against a backdrop of mounting concern in Washington about a rollback in democracy in Russia under President Vladimir Putin and questions about where the bilateral relationship is headed.
A report released Sunday by the non-profit Council on Foreign Relations said that 15 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, US-Russia relations were clearly moving in the wrong direction.
"The political balance sheet of the past five years is extremely negative," the report said.
It noted that while Bush has made democracy a goal of his foreign policy, Putin seems to be moving in the opposite direction by muzzling the press, virtually stripping parliament of power, and using his country's energy resources as a political weapon, as was the case during the recent gas dispute with Ukraine.
"Contention is crowding out consensus," the report said. "The very idea of a 'strategic partnership' no longer seems realistic."
Mark Medish, an expert on Russia and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, summed up the current US-Russia relationship as one of missed opportunities.
"It takes two to tango and both of the tango partners haven't been living up to the potential," Medish told AFP.
He said the United States and its European partners needed to reassess their relationship with Moscow and engage in more candid discussions.
"We in the United States go through cycles with Russia, talking about a strategic partnership as though we were getting married, to then talking about disappointment and divorce and child custody," said Medish, who was part of the task force that drew up the report issued by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
He and others said the upcoming G8 summit to be hosted by Russia was the perfect venue for the US and its partners to reevaluate relations with Moscow and raise a number of issues of concern.
"The G8 summit is an ideal opportunity to remind Russia as a fellow member ... that the basis of the grouping is to have high common denominators of standards rather than low common denominators," Medish said.
Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said the July G8 summit in St Petersburg was odd in that seven members of the group had contentious issues with the eighth member Russia.
"It's a very unusual situation where the host has aroused as many doubts and questions in the other countries involved," Sonnenfeldt told AFP. "And most of the leaders, from Bush on to the others, don't want to have an open dispute and fight with the Russian leader but they all have their questions."
Former congressman Jack Kemp, who co-chaired the bipartisan task force that drew up the CFR report, said cooperation with Russia was essential on a number of issues including Iran, energy, AIDS and terrorism.
"The G8 summit may be a watershed on many of these issues, Iran and energy in particular," Kemp said. "It's a real opportunity to lock in more helpful Russian policies.
"But if we don't see progress, people are going to ask what Russia is doing in the G8 in the first place."
