Putin will use his final G8 summit before leaving office in 2008 to insist, as he did last week, that Russia is no "monster that just left the forest"
MOSCOW: Russian President Vladimir Putin will use charm , laced with characteristic severity, to assert Moscow's return to great power status at this week's G8 summit in Germany amid yawning East-West divisions, analysts say.
Disputes ahead of the Group of Eight summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, threaten to transform a cosy meeting of the world's most powerful countries into a clash with the club's newest and most controversial member. But analysts believe Putin will use his final G8 summit before leaving office in 2008 to insist, as he did last week, that Russia is no "monster that just left the forest" - and that his G8 partners from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States will listen.
"Putin won't have to shake his fists and bare his teeth. He will rather show that his country is on an equal footing with the others. There won't be attacks on Russia and he will be smiling and charming," said analyst Masha Lipman from the Carnegie Moscow Centre.
On issues like global warming and African poverty, Putin will be able to portray Russia as working arm-in-arm with the rest of the G8 during the June 6-8 talks. Moscow also agrees broadly with Western-led campaigns to curb the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran, if not always on the details.
A flood of petrodollars means Russia is richer and more confident than ever and Moscow hopes to build on Putin's hosting of the G8 last year at a lavish palace in Saint Petersburg. Back then, Russia was celebrating final acceptance in the club of leading capitalist democracies. In Germany, where several leaders, such as France's recently elected President Nicolas Sarkozy, will be relative newcomers, Putin will find himself a senior statesman.
"He will be more experienced than many of them," Kremlin G8 pointman Igor Shuvalov told journalists Thursday. "He will understand some questions better than some people around that table." Yet with East-West trust at a post-Soviet low and talk of a new Cold War, Putin may struggle to find friends, analysts say.
"Relations are as bad as they've ever been," said James Nixey, a Russia analyst at the British think tank Chatham House. "It will be like an awkward dinner party." A week ahead of the summit Russia tested a new multiple warhead ballistic missile in what officials described as an answer to the US plan for deploying an anti-missile system in the Czech Republic and Poland. Washington claims the system would guard Europe against potential missile threats from Iran or North Korea, while Moscow instead sees aggressive military expansion into its former Soviet backyard.
Putin on Thursday talked openly of a "new arms racenderline Russia's position on the top issues, to show that Russia will not buckle to Western pressure on any questions, and it will hold an independent line," said Yevgeny Volk, an analyst for the US-based Heritage Foundation.
"Putin is interested in countering his critics," Volk added, "but on the other hand Russia is stronger now, so he is less dependent on their opinions."
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