. . .

QUESTION: Let me get your sense of Vladimir Putin as well as, you know, he met this week with Mahmud Ahmadi-Nejad in Iran and had said that the country, Iran, has the right to peaceful nuclear energy and would do what he can to support that. He has also said that the United States should set a timetable to get out of Iraq.

Increasingly, his comments, while not necessarily bellicose, have not been friendly. Is it fair to say, Secretary, that President Putin and President Bush do not enjoy the same close relationship they enjoyed a few years ago?

SECRETARY RICE: Our relationship with Russia is not an adversarial relationship. Yes, we have some differences on policies. I would note cite, by the way, Iran as an area in which we have wide differences. We have some tactical differences with the Russians about when we ought to have another Security Council resolution, sometimes about how strong those resolutions should be. But I would just in Moscow and the Russians remain with us on a course that is really a two-track course. On the one hand, we're encouraging negotiations. There will be talks between Larijani and Solana next week. We hope that those talks show that Iran might be ready and willing to accede to international demands. But if not --

QUESTION: Yeah, but we don't know -- what about this special proposal, Secretary, that Mr. Putin referred to? What was that?

SECRETARY RICE: I have every reason to believe that what the Russians said to the Iranians is very much in line with what the P-5+1, meaning the EU-3 countries -- Germany, France, Britain -- and China, the United States and Russia have been saying to the Iranians all along, which is that they need to abandon their efforts to get technologies that could lead to a nuclear weapon, except a civil nuclear program that would not have proliferation risk, come to negotiations in order to do it. And they need to live up to what is -- what their obligations would be under these Security Council resolutions. And nothing that I have seen suggests that the Russians did anything that would be counter to that line.

QUESTION: So even when they say that there is sort of a right for Iran to have peaceful use of nuclear energy, that doesn't jive with anything I've heard either you or the President ever say.

SECRETARY RICE: Well, actually, Neil, we don't object to the Iranians having civil nuclear issue -- nuclear energy. We don't object to it at all. In fact, we've supported the Russian concept of having maybe even a joint venture with the Iranians to allow them to have civil nuclear energy. The issue is not to allow the Iranians on their territory to enrich and reprocess, which is a technology that can be used to enrich nuclear materials to a level that can be used in weapons. So --

QUESTION: But once you're on the civil nuclear path, right, it's really not a big leap to go further, right?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, if you have the potential, the ability to enrich and reprocess on your territory, then yes there is a danger, a real risk of the ability to make a nuclear weapon.

QUESTION: I see.

SECRETARY RICE: But if the enrichment and reprocessing is done someplace else and the fuel is supplied to a civil nuclear reactor, then that fuel is taken back, that significantly decreases the risk of proliferation. And we have supported that kind of civil nuclear program for Iran.

. . .