Best Friends Forever?

Russia has become the focus of the Bush administration's hard-knuckle diplomacy inside the U.N. Security Council, according to senior State Department officials. With little more than two weeks to go before a vote on the latest resolution against Iraq, the United States and its allies remain far short of the nine votes they need to win their go-ahead for war. (Even a vote, thought to be a safe bet, that would have allowed the transport of U.S. troops through Turkey stalled in the Turkish Parliament last weekend; a new vote was scheduled this week.) So it was no coincidence that President Vladimir Putin's chief of staff, Aleksandr Voloshin, visited Washington last week as the diplomatic traffic between the White House and the Kremlin intensified.

Though Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov threatens to veto a U.S. attack, the man to watch, in judging Moscow's intentions, is Voloshin. According to sources, the Bush administration's new game plan is to win Russia's abstention on a new U.N. resolution, rather than trying to get its outright support. "In terms of the council dynamics, if Russia doesn't veto, then it's very hard for the French to do so," explains one senior administration official. "Russia is more about averting the vetoes, although ...