Maastrocht the Netherlands- As per Flisabeth Bumiller,New York Times, President Bush took the proper thread of the 60th anniversary of defeat of Nazi Germany and warned President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Saturday and said," No good purpose is served by stirring up fears and exploiting old rivalries in the former Soviet republics on his borders.

According to Multimedia, Video: Bush in Latvia:"All the nations that border Russia will benefit from the spread of democratic values, and so will Russia itself," Mr. Bush said in a speech in Riga, Latvia, in the Small Guild House, a neo-gothic meeting hall in the capital's Old City. "Stable, prosperous democracies are good neighbors, trading in freedom and posing no threat to anyone."

The president pointedly said, "The United States has free and peaceful nations to the north and south of us" and "we do not consider ourselves to be encircled."

Mr. Bush then flew to the Netherlands for a brief overnight stay before meeting and dinner with Mr. Putin at the Russian presidential dacha outside Moscow on Sunday, which is taking on the appearance of a showdown as Mr. Bush has spoken repeatedly of the pain that Baltic nations like Latvia endured under the Soviet occupation after World War II.

Mr. Bush is in Europe to mark the anniversary of Hitler's defeat; he will join Mr. Putin for celebrations in Red Square on Monday.

In his speech on Saturday, Mr. Bush seemed certain to irritate Mr. Putin further when he warned him as he had in February about retreating on democracy. "All free and successful countries have some common characteristics - freedom of worship, freedom of the press, economic liberty, the rule of law and the limitation of power through checks and balances," Mr. Bush said.

In the last year the United States has grown concerned over Mr. Putin's prosecution of business leaders, his increasing control over the press and his involvement in the affairs of Georgia and other neighbors.

Mr. Putin has not reacted positively to such criticism from Mr. Bush in the past, and this week he told the CBS News program "60 Minutes" that Mr. Bush had little business lecturing him about democracy when the 2000 presidential election in the United States was decided by the Supreme Court.

In a joint news conference with Baltic leaders in Riga earlier on Saturday, Mr. Bush put more pressure on Mr. Putin by calling for "free and open and fair" elections in Belarus, the last dictatorship in Europe, whose president, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, is backed by Mr. Putin. Mr. Bush also did not dispute the premise of a question from a reporter implying that the United States was behind revolutionary change in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.

"The idea of countries helping others become free, I hope that would be viewed as not revolutionary, but rational foreign policy, as decent foreign policy, as humane foreign policy," Mr. Bush said.

So he leveled his harshest criticism against Russia for acts after World War II, and seemed to lean as much toward a denunciation of postwar Soviet acts as celebratory words for the Nazi defeat.

"As we mark a victory of six decades ago, we are mindful of a paradox," he said. "For much of Germany, defeat led to freedom. For much of Eastern and Central Europe, victory brought the iron rule of another empire. V-E Day marked the end of fascism, but not the end of oppression."

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