US President George W. Bush will hope his personal chemistry with Russia's Vladimir Putin can ease their countries' rifts one last time when he goes next week to stay at the Russian leader's Black Sea villa.
Bush said when he first met Putin seven years ago he "was able to get a sense of his soul" and since then their warm rapport has helped limit the damage from a series of rows that have turned ties between their administrations distinctly chilly.
The US leader will fly from a Nato summit next week in Bucharest to join Putin at his vacation residence in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi - probably their last one-to-one meeting before the Kremlin leader steps down in May.
They will be hoping the pine-scented seaside air and their friendship will be the missing ingredients needed to reach agreement on thorny issues, chief among them Washington's plans for a missile shield in eastern Europe.
"(It will be) warm feelings all around, opportunities to do what they do best, which is to show what great friends they are," said Rose Gottemoeller, a former US arms control official who heads the Carnegie Moscow Centre, a think tank.
Like Putin, Bush is coming the end of his term in office and he hopes to use the summit to agree on a US-drafted strategic framework document that will allow both leaders to bequeath a stable relationship to their successors.
"Bush and Putin both want to be remembered for contributing to peace and not increasing tensions," said a Western diplomat. There is consensus on counter-terrorism and nuclear non-proliferation items in the document, but the missile shield is a major sticking point.
Washington wants to station interceptor missiles and a radar station in Poland and the Czech Republic to protect against missile strikes from what it calls "rogue states", specifically Iran. Moscow says the shield threatens its security.
But Russian officials have made positive noises about US moves to reassure Moscow over the shield, including an offer to let Russia inspect the installations and keep the system dormant unless there is proof of an imminent threat. "I think they (the Russians) are beginning to accept the old adage that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar," said Gottemoeller.
"They've decided to try to work with the Americans with the view that perhaps they can influence what goes forward on the missile defence system." The last time the two leaders paraded their friendship at a "no-neckties" summit was last July at the Bush family vacation home in Kennebunkport in Maine. Bush and ex-KGB spy Putin went fishing and ate lobster.
In Sochi, Bush will stay in a compound built in the last century for vacationing Communist Party officials, set among pine trees a short walk from the sea. Putin could let Bush take the wheel of his Soviet-built vintage car, the same vehicle they drove together near Moscow three years ago and which he sometimes has shipped down to the Black Sea. Or they could pet the pony which, reporters who have seen it say, the Russian leader keeps in the compound.
Some observers have speculated that Dmitry Medvedev, Putin's protege who will take over as president on May 7, will join the two men at the Bocharov Ruchei compound. Bush's opponents have pilloried him over his friendship with Putin.
"This is the president that looked in the soul of Putin, and I could have told him, he was a KGB agent," Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Hillary Clinton said this year. "By definition he doesn't have a soul." But Bush, announcing this week he was travelling to Sochi, said he had a reason for maintaining warm relations with Putin: "So that he'll listen to what I say."
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