US, Russian lawmakers to meet, discuss tensions

WASHINGTON, June 5 (Reuters) US and Russian lawmakers will hold a joint session of their foreign affairs committees in Washington later this month to discuss growing tensions between the two countries, the chairman of the US House of Representatives panel announced today.

''I very much hope .... that we will have a meaningful and helpful dialogue with our Russian colleagues so that the current state of tension between Russia and the United States could somehow be diminished,'' said House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos, a California Democrat.

Lantos' panel and the foreign affairs committee of the Russian parliament will meet on June 21, Lantos announced to the House.

While US and Russian lawmakers have met several times in recent years behind closed doors, Lantos said this was the first time that an open joint hearing would be held.

In recent months Washington has clashed with Moscow over US plans to build a missile shield in Eastern Europe. Russia and the United States are also at odds on the fate of breakaway Serbian province of Kosovo, and criticism that Moscow is retreating on democracy and bullying neighbors once part of the Soviet Union.

To try to ease tensions, US President George W Bush has invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to Bush's parents' home in Kennebunkport, Maine, on July 1-2. The American president, who is currently in Europe, is also expected to see Putin there this week at a meeting of major powers in Germany.

Lantos hoped the lawmakers' meeting in Washington would give US and Russian lawmakers the chance to explore ''all of the issues that at the moment seem to divide us'' before Bush and Putin meet in Kennebunkport.

He announced the joint hearing as the House debated a proposal to express US solidarity with ex-Soviet Estonia in its frictions with Russia. Moscow has lashed out at Estonia for removing a monument to World War Two soldiers from the center of the capital Tallinn to a military cemetery.

Lantos, who was born in Hungary and said he was ''the only member in the history of Congress who was liberated by the Russian army'' in World War Two, said he did not think Estonia should have moved the statue -- but that the Russian reaction was also unwarranted.

REUTERS JK BST0305