Biden in Moscow for 2 days of talks

[March 09, 2011]  MOSCOW (AP) -- Two years after he introduced the phrase "push the reset button" for America's relations with Russia, Vice President Joe Biden is in Moscow to see what sort of fine-tuning is needed.

Biden plans two days of meetings Wednesday and Thursday, including with President Dmitry Medvedev, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and representatives of Russia's beleaguered opposition groups. He is to cap the trip with an address at Moscow State University that is expected to lay out the White House's vision for U.S.-Russian relations in the last half of President Barack Obama's term.

"This trip for the vice president is an opportunity to take stock of the reset and what we've achieved and where we hope to go next," said Biden's national security adviser Tony Blinken.

The address and the results of his meetings with Russia's leadership duo will be closely parsed at home, where Obama's policies run head-on into newly confident congressional Republicans who are frequently suspicious of Russia. The signal achievement of Obama's Russia policy to date, the New START arms-control treaty, was ratified by the U.S. Senate only after extensive efforts to bring hesitant Republicans on board.

An even-knottier defense issue will be on the top of Biden's agenda: European missile defense.

After years of opposition, Russia agreed last fall to talk about cooperating with NATO and the United States on an anti-ballistic missile plan for Europe, which the U.S. says may be needed if Iran develops nuclear weapons.

But Moscow has refused to budge from its demand for joint control, and has been keeping up the rhetorical pressure. Last fall, Medvedev said if an agreement on missile defense can't be reached, Russia may deploy new offensive weapons, triggering a new arms race.

"We are, I think, on the verge of trying to take an issue that used to be extremely contentious between the United States and Russia and to try to see if we can make this an area of cooperation," the White House's Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs Mike McFaul said last week.

The other key issue, McFaul said, will be to try to facilitate Russia's entry into the World Trade Organization.

Russia, the largest economy outside the WTO, has sought membership, with varying levels of enthusiasm, for the past decade and a half. Although the country wants to improve its prospects for international trade, it has been leery of dropping some protectionist tariffs. The United States has supported WTO membership for Russia, believing that developing the country's economy will lead to more stability.

"This cannot be a relationship just about arms control and nonproliferation. It has to be about investment, it has to be about innovation," McFaul said.

Despite advances in the manufacturing sector, Russia remains largely a natural-resources economy, with exports of oil and natural gas as its backbone. Russia is concerned that dropping import tariffs for manufactured goods such as automobiles could undermine its attempts to boost industry.

Biden on Wednesday will make a visit to the Moscow suburb of Skolkovo, where the Russian government is building a so-called innovation center that it sees as its equivalent of Silicon Valley. The vast project has been greeted with some skepticism by critics who note that Silicon Valley developed flexibly and organically, rather than by the topdown strategy of Skolkovo.

The United States has encouraged Russia to develop its technology sector by arranging a visit by Medvedev to Silicon Valley last year.

After leaving Moscow on Friday, Biden is to make a short visit to Moldova, the poorest country in Europe. The White House has said the trip would aim at signaling support for a resolution of the dispute over Moldova's breakaway region of Trans-Dniester. Russia has about 1,500 troops stationed in the separatist region and it was unclear whether Biden would raise the question of their presence with Russian officials.

[Associated Press; By JIM HEINTZ]

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