MOSCOW (AP) - United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan met with President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin on Wednesday and praised the Russian leader for trying to bring the Indian and Pakistani leaders together for face-to-face talks at an Asian security conference in Kazakhstan.
"I want to thank you for the efforts you made in Almaty," Annan told the Russian leader. "I was amused to hear them say President Putin failed to make peace ... when the actual situation was that the two leaders failed to seize the opportunity offered by the conference."
Putin tried - without success - to get Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to sit down for direct talks at the Almaty conference this week. The two nuclear-armed neighbors are locked in a tense standoff over the disputed Himalayan province of Kashmir.
The Indian and Pakistani leaders did join other regional leaders at a long conference table in Almaty but angrily blamed each other for more than five decades of conflict.
The two countries have one million soldiers deployed along their common frontier and frequently exchange artillery and gun fire across the Kashmir border. Vajpayee has said he is willing to talk with Pakistan, but demands that Pakistan first halt cross-border terrorism in India-controlled Kashmir.
Despite the lack of a breakthrough at the summit, Putin said his diplomatic efforts were not in vain. "Many of our partners said maybe today it would be premature, that the domestic political situation in both countries is such that a meeting could upset a delicate balance," he told Annan.
"The most important thing was that they agreed to the principle of resolving the conflict without using force ... they gave us what we could interpret as positive signs giving us hope," he said.
Earlier Wednesday, Annan laid a wreath at Moscow's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and visited a medical clinic to draw attention to efforts to combat the growing AIDS epidemic in the former Soviet Union.