U.S. President George W. Bush will meet President Vladimir Putin for the last time in Sochi this weekend. The agenda is full of contentious issues – Kosovo, anti-missile defence, NATO expansion and the state of Russian-U.S. relations.
There could be two reasons for this meeting. Bush has only a matter of weeks to make some kind of broad strategic deal with Putin before Putin steps down in favour of President-elect Dmitry Medvedev. Such a deal could quite possibly be the single foreign policy success of Bush's presidency.