Europe wary, US dismissive after Putin tirade

MUNICH, Germany, Feb 11 (Reuters) President Vladimir Putin's anti-US tirade gripped the West's attention today, with Washington saying he was out of step with the times while some Europeans saw it as a wake-up call from a tougher Russia.

Putin's charge yesterday that Washington was fuelling a nuclear arms race in a quest to subjugate the world to ''one single master'' stunned a conference of top security officials in Munich.

Yet while US officials mostly played it down as empty rhetoric divorced from the real world, European listeners said it showed the West must square up to a brash and combative new Russia, both in the Putin era and beyond.

''We should take him at his word. This was the real Russia of now, and possibly in four or five years time it could go further in this direction,'' Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt told Reuters on the margins of the annual Munich gathering.

''We have to have a dialogue with Russia but we must be hard-nosed and realistic. We must stand up for our values.'' New Pentagon chief Robert Gates, a former CIA director, shrugged the comments off as blunt-talking from an old spy and said it had not stopped him accepting an invitation from former KGB agent Putin to visit Russia.

''One Cold War was quite enough,'' Gates told the meeting.

In Washington, the White House expressed disappointment at the speech from the man whose soul President George W Bush famously said six years ago he had admiringly looked into.

US Principle Deputy Assistance Secretary of State for Europe Kurt Volker said he listened to Putin with a sense of disconnect from reality.

''That was like a parallel universe. The rest of us were in there talking about common challenges,'' he told Reuters.

MAXIMUM EFFECT In a speech delivered for maximum effect before a Munich audience packed with senior ministers and security officials, Putin attacked the concept of a ''unipolar world'' and said US actions abroad had made conflicts worse.

''What is a unipolar world? No matter how we beautify this term it means one single centre of power, one single centre of force and one single master,'' Putin said, slamming notably US plans to site missile defence systems in ex-Soviet Poland and Czech Republic as a potential threat to Moscow.

It came a day after Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov a possible successor to Putin in the Kremlin launched a similar broadside to bemused NATO counterparts in Seville on Friday.

Russian-West relations are at a crucial point, with the United States and its allies appealing for Moscow's support to resolve the dispute over Iran's nuclear ambitions and in securing the future of the breakaway Serb province of Kosovo.

The European Union wants to negotiate a new partnership pact with Moscow, knowing all the time that its hand is weakened by its dependence on Russian energy supplies.

''I do not see how we can negotiate a new partnership pact on this basis,'' said German Green Angelika Beer, a member of the European Parliament.

''We need Russia for energy and Kosovo. He knows that but perhaps he is going over the top,'' she said, noting that the short shrift Putin gave to questions about human rights concerns at the meeting had alienated many potential sympathisers.

US allies jumped on Putin's speech to declare that it showed why the West should show a united front to Moscow. Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg ironically thanked him, saying he had vindicated NATO's decision to taken in members from the former Soviet east over the past decade.

''This Munich conference is normally about the Americans and Europeans bitching at each other,'' said Ron Asmus, executive director of the Transatlantic Center thinktank in Brussels.

''It will be interesting to see whether Putin actually managed to bring us together.'' Reuters SY DB1834