Back in 2001, Vladimir Putin was seeking respect from world leaders while pledging a new openness in Russia.
Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine makes it hard to remember — or even imagine — that in the early years of his presidency, two decades ago, Vladimir Putin was on a charm offensive with the West.
He owned a ranch just outside of town — he’d named the property Prairie Chapel — and he and first lady Laura Bush had invited the Russian leader and his wife Lyudmila to spend the night.
“We had a great dinner last night,” Bush told the cheering student body assembled in the school gymnasium, with a banner that read “Welcome President & President.” Dressed in a brown canvas work jacket, Bush seemed to be a very proud host, adding, “We had a little Texas barbecue, pecan pie, a little Texas music.
Speaking through an interpreter, Putin used his remarks to highlight the two leaders’ friendship and cooperation.
Bush encouraged Putin to take that question, saying that like himself, the Russian president had a “keen desire” to free Afghanistan’s women.
But she says the most memorable part was not asking a question, but afterward when the two presidents left the stage to greet members of the audience up close.
More than 20 years later, it’s all still pretty vivid, she says.
Today Buckner is 38 years old and says when she turned on her television and saw all of the horrific images of death and suffering and destruction from the war in Ukraine, it shocked her.
Just south of Crawford, at the University of Texas, Robert Moser is a longtime professor of Russian politics and history.
Mary Elise Sarotte, a Russia expert at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, says looking back, the Bush-Putin summit was a high point of U.S.-Russia relations this century.
But Sarotte points out that moments of friendship between adversaries, a thaw in cold relations, are often fleeting.