Putin Fires A Parting Shot At Bush At NATO Meeting
RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin last night let fly at one of his last meetings with his US counterpart, George W.Bush, saying some NATO countries had demonised Moscow and failed to reward Russia for helping end the Cold War.

A source in the Russian delegation to the NATO summit in Bucharest said Mr Putin - who is due to hold talks with Mr Bush at the Black Sea port of Sochi early today - challenged US policy towards Iran and said the Islamic republic should be helped to emerge from isolation, instead of being threatened.

In his address to the 26 heads of state and government leaders, Mr Putin also attacked NATO leaders for forcing Moscow to accept enlargement of the alliance into the former Soviet bloc.

"Some went as far as total demonisation of Russia and can't get away from this even now. Some began to talk about imperial ambitions," Mr Putin said in his address to NATO leaders in the Romanian capital.

Mr Putin said Russia had peacefully withdrawn from Eastern Europe after the Soviet collapse and "of course expected something in return. But this didn't come."

However, Mr Putin did say Moscow was ready to return to a key Cold War-era arms treaty if Western powers compromised.

Russia agreed to allow NATO to use Russian land to deliver non-lethal supplies to alliance troops in Afghanistan, but not troops or air transit arrangements as initially sought by NATO.

Earlier, Mr Putin had enjoyed a final diplomatic victory over Mr Bush and in the process created a headache for the next US president by forcing NATO to slow down its eastward expansion.

The Russian President convinced Washington's allies in NATO, the world's most powerful military alliance, to reject Mr Bush's backing for Ukraine and Georgia.

Mr Bush had hoped right up to the last moment that admission plans for Ukraine and Georgia would form part of his foreign policy legacy but instead the issueprovided a parting coup forMr Putin, who steps down next month.

Eastern European members of NATO backed Mr Bush's proposal but German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy heeded Mr Putin's warnings that Mr Bush's expansion plans were unnecessarily provocative and would destabilise the region.

In the end, even the staunch US ally Gordon Brown of Britain refused to line up behind Mr Bush, who has nine months left in office.

The next US president will have to grapple with the same difficult issue, as Mr Bush won a concession from his NATO allies in the form of an in-principle declaration that Ukraine and Georgia would be admitted at some unnamed date.

Mr Putin's supporters in Moscow last night celebrated NATO's rebuff of Mr Bush asfinal proof that the former KGB colonel- had managed during eight increasingly assertive years as President to regain some of Russia's lost international standing.

The lack of a competitive democracy in Russia has allowed Mr Putin to position Dmitry Medvedev as his successor, ensuring the continuation of his own foreign policies and Moscow's fierce resistance to any further expansion of NATO up to Russia's borders.

Mr Bush had also backed the admission of Macedonia but Greece vetoed the entry of the former Yugoslav republic because of claims in Athens that the name "Republic of Macedonia" implied territorial ambitions by that country to take over the Greek region called Macedonia.

Macedonia officials deny any such ambitions and walked out of the three-day summit in protest.

The NATO leaders agreed to admit Croatia and Albania as the alliance's 27th and 28th members, probably next year, but it was Ukraine and Georgia that generated most of the diplomatic heat.

Both countries built up their goodwill in Washington by sending troops to Iraq, and Georgia still has 2000 troops there, making it the third-largest contributor to the international coalition after the US and Britain.

But several Western European members of NATO were worried that the simmering tensions between Russia and Georgia over two rebellious and pro-Russian regions of Georgia could drag the Western alliance into armed conflict with Moscow.

The most potent factor, however, was a reluctance to antagonise Russia, the main source of Europe's oil and gas imports.