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WASHINGTON - Russian President Vladimir Putin's muscle-flexing over the country's huge energy profits is undermining Moscow's relations with the West, a senior US lawmaker said today, comparing the Kremlin leader with the cartoon character Popeye.
"They're eating the spinach of petroleum revenues, and the billions are flowing into the Kremlin, and with every billion ... Putin's muscles bulge more powerfully," Rep Tom Lantos, chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, told Reuters in an interview.
But while today's Kremlin may act as though its vast reserves of oil and minerals have given it "energy power over Europe," it should become more cooperative as it grows accustomed to its oil boom, Lantos said as he prepared to meet his Russian counterparts this week.
"I am convinced that when this euphoria of energy revenues will be taken more routinely, the Kremlin leadership will understand that their future lies with cooperation with the United States and Europe in a mutually respectful and civilised fashion," he said.
Lantos, a California Democrat, hosts a joint session of his panel and the foreign affairs committee of the Russian Duma, or parliament, this Thursday on Capitol Hill. Although there have been other such meetings since the end of the Cold War, this will be the first session held in public.
Lantos sees the get-together as setting the stage for a meeting between President George W Bush and Putin at the Bush family vacation home in Maine early next month.
The aim of the lawmakers' meeting is to have a "serious, substantive, comprehensive dialogue on all the issues that the two countries have with one another," the chairman said.
Tensions between Moscow and countries of the West have risen sharply in recent years. There have been disagreements over trade, statehood for Kosovo, and what Lantos called Russia's "ruthless suppression of internal dissent" as well as Moscow's occasional cutoff of energy supplies to its neighbours.
Russia strongly opposes a planned US missile defence system in Eastern Europe, and Putin earlier this month alarmed the West by threatening to re-target Russian missiles on Europe if the plan goes ahead -- a remark Lantos called "incredibly stupid."
He said a number of Putin's recent actions and statements -- such as one remark seen as a thinly veiled comparison between the United States and Hitler's Third Reich -- have been counterproductive.
For example, Lantos announced in February he would like to see Congress scrap a Cold War law known as the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which links normal US trade relations with communist and formerly communist countries to their citizens' rights to emigrate freely.
He said fellow US lawmakers now are resisting because of Putin's recent behaviour. "He is undermining my efforts to bring Jackson-Vanik to an end."
Lantos is a Hungarian-born Jew and Holocaust survivor who moved to the United States after World War 2. "I have particularly warm feelings toward Russia because I owe my life to having been liberated by the Russian army," he said.
He thinks Thursday's meeting with Russian lawmakers will be friendly, even if critical comments are made by both sides.
"It will be healthy and helpful for them to hear our views and for us to hear their views. We are a long way from being perfect, but we are an open and democratic society which should not be compared to the Third Reich," Lantos said.
- REUTERS
