The White House said Saturday it does not expect President George W. Bush and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to clinch an agreement on US missile defense plans during talks this weekend in Sochi. “We're going to have to do more work after Sochi,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters traveling with Bush, who was to meet Putin Saturday at the Russian leader's residence on the Black Sea coast. “We are still in the early part of these discussions,” she said. The talks with Putin come after a NATO summit in Romania where the alliance endorsed Bush's missile shield despite Russia's deep concern about the scheme. The United States says its plan to install missiles in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic must go forward to counter threats from “rogue states” like Iran. Russia says the plan directly threatens its own security. The White House spokeswoman it would be “premature” to expect a deal coming out of the meeting in Sochi on missile defense, but that progress was being made. “I think we have made great strides in bringing confidence to the Russians that this system is not aimed at Russia and Russia is not the enemy,” she said. “We believe that it is possible for the United States, Russia and Europe to all work together and we've been trying to include transparency and confidence-building measures along those lines,” she added. Perino said she expected Bush and Putin to sign a “strategic framework” agreement that would guide their successors. “I think it will be broad,” she said. Fresh from a Bucharest summit of NATO leaders where the American president was the ostensible first among equals but Putin signed autographs and spoke as an honored guest, Bush and Putin will meet at the Russian leader's Black Sea dacha in Sochi. Disputes over NATO enlargement, the fledgling Balkan republic of Kosovo and a US missile defense project to be built in eastern Europe have driven US-Russian ties to what many analysts consider a post-Cold War low, although trade has been unaffected. Over the course of seven years and more than 20 meetings the Bush-Putin relationship has moved from one in which Bush said he looked into Putin's soul and trusted him, to a wary rivalry. __
