US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday ahead of a visit to Moscow next week that Washington and its European allies were "very concerned" about the Kremlin's policy course.
The concentration of power amassed by President Vladimir Putin has been "troubling," she told Congress shortly after the Russian leader and US President George W. Bush held telephone talks on the state of bilateral ties.
"It's fair to say that there has been a turning back from some of the reforms that led to the decentralization of power out of the Kremlin: a strong legislature, strong free press, an independent judiciary," Rice said.
"I think everybody around the world, in Europe, in the United States, is very concerned about the internal course that Russia has taken in recent years," she said at a Senate committee hearing on foreign relations.
Kremlin spokesman Alexei Gromov said the two presidents "discussed preparations for the G8 summit (in June), questions of bilateral Russian-American relations and several other questions of international relations," the Interfax news agency reported.
On Wednesday at a massive military parade on Red Square to mark the defeat of Nazi Germany, Putin attacked US unilateralism by seeming to equate the Bush administration with Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.
He warned of "new threats" based on "the same contempt for human life and the same claims of exceptionalism and diktat in the world as in the Third Reich."
The speech struck a confrontational note ahead of the talks in Moscow next week between Rice and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
Relations between Moscow and Washington have been increasingly tense in recent months over US plans to deploy elements of a new missile defense system in two former Soviet states near Russia's border.
Rice said that the Russians "do not accept fully that our relations with countries that are their neighbors ... are quite honestly simply good relations between independent states and the United States."
Rice's talks with Lavrov will cover nuclear non-proliferation, missile defense and the development of democracy in Russia, according to the State Department.
"We very much hope there will be truly free and fair elections as Russia moves forward with presidential and parliamentary elections next year," Rice said at the Senate hearing.
"But the concentration of power in the Kremlin has been troubling."
Rice also said that with Europe, the United States was pressing for Russia not to use its vast energy resources as a "political weapon."
Western Europe suffered gas shortfalls at the start of 2006 when Russia's gas exporting monopoly Gazprom cut off supplies through Ukraine due to a pricing dispute with the ex-Soviet republic.
