An Early Frost; While America may be locked in a nasty cold-war dialogue with Russia, Europe looks for a way out.

Byline: Owen Matthews (With Stryker McGuire in London, Anna Nemtsova in Moscow, Tracy McNicoll in Paris, John Barry in Washington)

What a difference a year makes. Last summer, when Vladimir Putin hosted the G8's annual summit in St. Petersburg, the Russian president--supercharged by his country's oil-fueled economic boom--seemed the star attraction. He and the Bush administration hammered out a joint strategy on Iran, and Putin expansively welcomed his European neighbors into a new "energy partnership."

The tone at the G8 meeting this week in Heiligendamm, Germany, will be decidedly chillier. Putin has gone from genial host to scary guest. In the last 12 months he has been at the center of a series of ugly incidents, including rows with neighbors and the expropriation of foreign oil company assets in Russia. Moscow has also sold air-defense systems to Iran, jet fighters to Syria and a nuclear reactor to Burma. Inside Russia, meanwhile, Putin's opponents have started turning up dead, or have been jailed and beaten by the police.

The G8 is alarmed. U.S. senator and candidate John McCain has denounced Putin's recent rhetoric as "the most aggressive from a Russian leader since the end of the cold war." France's new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, swore on the campaign trail that he would not shrink from "denouncing human-rights violations" in Russia. And Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel, according to a German diplomat who was not authorized to speak on the record, was "chilled" by the defiance Putin showed over human-rights complaints at a recent meeting. The British, meanwhile are perturbed by Russia's refusal to extradite the leading suspect in the fatal poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian spy turned British citizen, ...