PRESIDENT BUSH arrives in Europe today for a trip that will test further his already strained relationship with President Putin of Russia. Mr Bush will use visits to Latvia and Georgia to promote his second-term drive for expanded freedoms.

He will try to do so without offending Mr Putin, whose help Mr Bush needs on some of his most pressing foreign policy priorities, particularly preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb.

The catalyst for Mr Bush’s trip is the 60th anniversary celebrations of the end of the Second World War that Mr Putin is hosting in Moscow on Monday, but he has plotted a route around the event to ensure that his respect for Russia’s 27 million war dead does not overlook the 50 years of totalitarian rule that followed in Eastern Europe or the creeping authoritarianism of Mr Putin’s regime.

In Riga, before going to Moscow, Mr Bush will visit the Freedom Monument, symbolising Latvia’s independence. He will also meet leaders of Lithuania and Estonia.

In Tbilisi, where he will fly to from Moscow, he will address tens of thousands in Freedom Square, the focal point of the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003 that triggered uprisings in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.

It will be the first visit to Georgia by a US President and is the leg most looked forward to by the White House.

In each country Mr Bush will hold talks with human rights and democracy activists.

White House officials insist that the choreography is not directed at Mr Putin, but Russians regard it as a challenge to their President’s efforts to retain Moscow’s influence over former Soviet republics.

The White House is also eyeing a possible summer visit to Ukraine, scene of the Orange Revolution last year. Together with Slovakia, which he visited in February, that would mean Mr Bush visiting four states that formed part of the Warsaw Pact in just five months.

“This is where Mr Bush sees his historical legacy as mattering,” Bruce Jackson, president of the Project on Transitional Democracies, said. “In the next four years these are the kinds of things he wishes to stand for and the kinds of political movements he thinks the US also should be encouraging.”

Mr Bush and his wife, Laura, will dine with the Putins in Moscow, a reminder of the bond that the leaders forged on Mr Bush’s European trip in 2001.

Mr Bush needs Mr Putin’s help over Iran, as well as wider support in the War on Terror and access to Russia’s energy supplies. Mr Putin needs US support for Russia’s bid for membership of the World Trade Organisation.

The relationship has become strained over Mr Putin’s anti-democratic reforms and restrictions on free speech and civil liberties. The last meeting between the leaders, in Slovakia in February, was notably awkward.

White House officials believe that they can still deal with Mr Putin but say the job is made harder by his senior officials feeding him misleading anti-American propaganda.

On Sunday Mr Bush will visit Allied graves at a war cemetery in the Netherlands to balance his presence in Moscow, where attention will be focused on the Eastern Front of the Second World War.

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