RUSSIA - June 16 - Putin Meets Bush.

Pres. Putin meets Pres. Bush at Brdo, near Ljubljana, Slovenia. This is their first tete-a-tete meeting which was followed by the talks on security co-operation, energy projects and US investments in the Russian economy between the two countries' delegations which included FM Igor Ivanov and his US counterpart Secretary of State Powell. After the meeting, Pres. Bush tells news conference: "This was a very good meeting. He is an honest, straightforward man who loves his country". Bush calls Putin a leader that Americans can trust. Putin says the meeting has proved that "reality was a lot bigger than expectations", and he asserts that an important Cold War milestone has been passed with Bush's declaration that Russia is no longer a US enemy. The two presidents came to look each other in the eye and they both appeared to like what they saw, even as they laid out the agenda of their extensive disagreements on missile defences, the expansion of the NATO and Moscow's growing arms trade with Iran.

(Analysts say the surprising reversal of tone in US-Russian relations may reflect how much each leader needs the positive outcome. Bush needs to prove to Europe and to the Senate that he is not engaged in recklessness as he pursues a new security concept that includes missile defences. And Putin needs to know that the Bush administration is not looking for a confrontation because Putin has his hands full at home trying to pull Russia beyond the wreckage of the Soviet era. In his first major diplomatic foray abroad, Bush discovered last week that Germany and France are sceptical to the US missile defence plan, each concerned that it would trigger a new arms race by not taking into account Moscow's and Beijing's concerns. Putin sharpened this point when he flied to Shanghai this week, where he and Pres. Jiang Zemin and the leaders of four Central Asian republics signed the founding charter of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation. Despite the warming with Bush, Putin seems to be fostering a new era of triangular diplomacy, positioning Russia to be an ally of China and of Europe as a hedge against US unilateralism. Putin has been seeking the meeting with Bush since almost the day after the US president's inauguration, but Bush's advisers delayed it for months, saying they were formulating a new policy towards Moscow. The two leaders will see each other again in July and October at the summit meeting of leading industrial nations in Genoa and of Asia-Pacific leaders in Shanghai).