"True, the President announced his initiative to appoint governors and bury local elections after Beslan-but a link between those steps and the anti-terror combat is vague, and was not duly demonstrated. When I am here in Russia, I get ample explanations just why the measures are within the context of the anti-terror cause, but the people in the States who are willing to accept Kremlin arguments did not receive them in time," says the political expert.
Stances on the Russian administrative reform depend on whether anti-graft measures and civil society progress will accompany it.
As for President Bush's opinion, that was worded quite explicitly-strategic partnership with Russia promotes the USA's strategic interests. President Putin has proved himself to be a serious and reliable partner. His proposed reform is ambiguous. Interested in partnership with democratic Russia, the USA naturally could not but say so to Moscow. However, it is too early, putting it mildly, to see the reform as an insurmountable barrier to closer contacts.
Whatever questions realists in the US foreign policies may be asking on the Putin initiative, one is not to back "an unblushing campaign unleashed by a coalition of neo-Conservatives, liberal interventionists and blatant Russophobes" out to pressure the Bush Administration to give up its partnership with Russia. The analyst here refers to a recent open letter of 115 prominent US and European intellectuals and policy makers, who called European Union and NATO countries' leaders to acknowledge that their Kremlin policies were a failure, and shift to the side of Russian democratic forces.
"It would be decent and responsible, after the appalling Beslan tragedy, for some of my American compatriots to wait a bit before they give the reins to their imperialist and Russophobiac emotions instead of throwing a hysterical fit to scream about Russian elections abolished and a dictatorship reinstated."
As the expert sees it, the letter that came down on the Kremlin was signed by leading neo-Conservatives who had enticed the United States in Iraq. Those were partly Republicans, partly liberal interventionists, including Senator John Kerry's principal advisers, and partly those "who prevented our concentration on Bin Laden". Blatant East European and American immigrant Russophobes joined the lot, and are out to make the USA fall out with Russia, said Dmitri Symes.
