President Bush risked further anger from the Kremlin today when he said that democracy in Russia had suffered under Vladimir Putin's rule.

Just hours before his arrival at the G8 summit in Germany — where proceedings have already been overshadowed by a row over America's plans to install missile interceptors in Eastern Europe — Mr Bush did little to improve the chill in relations between Moscow and the West.

Delivering a prepared speech in the Czech Republic, an erstwhile Soviet satellite that could soon house a US missile tracking facility, Mr Bush listed a number of countries where democracy was partial or where recent freedoms were in danger.

Although he acknowledged that freedom moves "at different speeds in different places", the US President levelled a particular accusation at Mr Putin and Moscow. "In Russia, reforms that once promised to empower citizens have been derailed, with troubling implications for democratic development," he said.

Mr Bush also criticised China, whose leaders, he said, "believe that they can continue to open the nation’s economy without also opening its political system". But greater attention will be paid to his disparagement of Mr Putin's Government.

During an interview with The Times last weekend, the Russian President described himself as "a pure and absolute democrat" but his presidency since 2000 has been laced with international criticism of its authoritarian tendencies and stained by the recent high profile murders of Alexander Litvinenko, a former spy, in London, and Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist, in Moscow.

In his last year in office, Mr Putin has also given increasingly angry interviews about Western, and primarily, American foreign policy. The build-up to this year's G8, which begins tomorrow in the German coastal resort of Heiligendamm, has been marked by his threat to aim Russia's nuclear weapons back towards Europe because of plans to extend a US missile shield to Poland and the Czech Republic.

Earlier, Mr Bush appeared to strike a conciliatory tone by assuring Mr Putin that the missile defences were aimed at stopping strikes from Iran and North Korea rather than the massive Russian nuclear arsenal which remains from the Cold War. He has also invited the Russian leader for an unprecedented stay at his family’s summer compound at Kennebunkport next month.

But Mr Putin has said that the missile shield is a move to cripple Russia's nuclear threat and has promised to develop missiles capable of defeating it.

"Russia is not the enemy," Mr Bush told a joint press with President Klaus and Mirek Topolanek, the Czech Prime Minister.

"Why don’t you co-operate on the missile defence system?" He said in a message to Mr Putin. "Why don’t you participate with the United States? Send your generals over to see how such a system would work, send your scientists," he added.

The US proposal to site a tracking radar on Czech soil as part of its extended missile defence system was one of the main issues broached during today's talks between Mr Bush and Czech leaders. Washington also wants to install ten missile interceptors in Poland, which like the Czech Republic, insists that the shield should enhance its own security.

"The Cold War is over," Mr Bush added. "It ended. People in the Czech Republic do not have to choose between being friends of the US or friends of Russia. You can be both."

Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor who is hosting the G8, will hope that the exchange of testy remarks between Mr Bush and Mr Putin will cease during the summit, which begins formally tomorrow after a dinner of the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, America and Russia tonight.

Ahead of the summit, the G8 'sherpas' were today trying to nail down the main points of a summit communique. Germany is pushing for an agreement to limit the global temperature rise to 2C (3.6F) and to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50 per cent compared to 1990 levels by 2050.

Mr Bush last week unveiled his own proposals on global warming and said a long-term goal for reducing greenhouses gases could be set by the end of 2008 - raising fears among environmentalists that Washington was trying to muddy the waters before the summit.

In a speech in Washington, David Miliband, the UK Environment Secretary, said that climate change was an economic, social and security issue, not just an "environmental" problem.

Mr Miliband told an audience at the Pew Centre on Global Climate Change that the technologies exist to enable the transition to a low-carbon global economy and that 2007 is a pivotal year for building a global consensus on tackling climate change.

But he added: "I am convinced that the big challenges that the world faces cannot be solved by any one country alone, but equally none of them will be solved without the United States."

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