Obama leaves for Moscow to ‘reset’ ties with Russia

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Washington: President Barack Obama headed to Moscow promising a far-reaching effort to ‘reset’ US-Russia relations that hit a post-Cold War low under the Bush administration.

Obama is expected to clinch summit deals on the outlines of a new nuclear arms pact and improved cooperation in the Afghan war effort, but deep divisions will remain over US missile defense, NATO expansion and the 2008 Russia-Georgia war. Traveling to Moscow for the first time since taking office, he hopes to keep building pragmatic ties with president Dmitry Medvedev but is likely to have a more strained introduction to Vladimir Putin, who still dominates Russian politics.

Obama set the stage with a pre-trip assessment that Putin still had ‘one foot’ planted in the Cold War. Putin, who hand-picked Medvedev as his successor last year and has stayed on as prime minister, rejected Obama’s criticism and insisted it was US policy that needed to be updated.

Despite the testy exchange, the two sides have settled on the old issue of arms control as the cornerstone for forging a less rancorous relationship between Washington and Moscow. “I seek to reset relations with Russia because I believe that Americans and Russians have many common interests, interests that our governments recently have not pursued as actively as we could have,” Obama told the Russian opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta ahead of the summit. Though details remained under wraps, the two presidents were expected to lay down markers for negotiating further cuts in the arsenals of the two biggest nuclear powers.

The talks will form the basis for a treaty to be signed by December, when an existing pact known as START-1 expires. The aim is to reduce the number of deployed warheads below the 1,700-2,200 allowed under the current pact.

The summit will also yield the Kremlin’s permission to ship US weapons supplies across Russian territory en route to US-led forces in Afghanistan, sources on both sides said. The transit deal will open up a crucial corridor for the United States as it steps up its fight against a resurgent Taliban in line with Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy.

The two agreements will be touted as evidence that both sides want to “press the reset button” -- to use Washington’s phrase -- on their rocky relations of recent years.

But it will be harder to bridge the gap on other issues.