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No missile, NATO deals at Bush-Putin meeting-Rice
By Elaine Monaghan
SHANGHAI, Oct 19 (Reuters) - President George W. Bush's national security adviser played down expectations on Friday for major breakthroughs on missile defence and NATO enlargement when Bush meets Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday.
A New York Times report had said the two countries had signalled they were near a breakthrough on U.S. plans for a missile defence opposed by Russia and Moscow's concerns about an enlarging NATO alliance.
"They're moving steadily along but there certainly isn't any expected agreement or anything like that," Condoleezza Rice said after Bush and Chinese President Jiang Zemin held a news conference ahead of an Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) group summit.
Rice was also asked if there might be movement on reducing the two countries' nuclear arsenals, a subject close to Russia's heart partly because of the high cost of maintaining them.
Bush and Putin are scheduled to meet on Sunday on the fringes of the weekend APEC summit in Shanghai. Bush aides described the meeting as a prelude to more discussions in the United States in November.
Putin has proposed mutual cuts to around 1,500 weapons each. The two countries had previously agreed to slash their arsenals to 3,500 missiles apiece.
"Well, you know we're doing an offence-defence link and that's been going on for some time," she said.
BIG IMPULSE IN RELATIONS
The two countries have been conducting negotiations Washington hopes will secure agreement for amendments to a Cold War-era pact called the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty that barred the missile defence system, while at the same time setting new limits for their nuclear arsenals.
The United States wants to build a new strategic framework on arms issues which it says have changed fundamentally with the end of the Cold War and the emergence of new nuclear threats from what it calls "rogue states" like North Korea, Iraq and Iran.
The attacks on September 11 on New York and Washington gave a big impulse to Russian-U.S. relations. Putin was the first foreign leader to call Bush, and the White House responded by backing Putin's call for peace talks with Chechen rebels.
Putin, frequently criticised for the scale of the Russian campaign in the independence-minded north Caucasus region, was also quick to back the U.S. strikes against Afghanistan in retaliation for the hijack assaults in the United States.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell met Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov on Thursday to prepare for the summit talks.
A senior State Department official gave a positive account of their meeting but gave no signal that a breakthrough was likely at the talks Sunday.
"Shanghai is not Crawford," one U.S. official said of Sunday's discussions, which will be followed by a trip by Putin some time in November to Bush's ranch in Texas.
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