WASHINGTON, May 23 (Reuters) - Despite appeals from Russian President Vladimir Putin, U.S. President George W. Bush does not plan to announce a boost in Russia's access to the U.S. market during their summit, officials said on Thursday.
But Bush will tell Putin that a decision on designating Russia a "market economy," which would benefit Russian exporters, could come next month.
Putin had hoped that Bush would make the announcement himself during his visit to Moscow, where on Friday the leaders will sign a treaty slashing U.S. and Russian long-range nuclear arsenals by two-thirds.
Instead, U.S. officials said Bush would tell his Russian counterpart -- a key ally in the war on terrorism -- that the country's economic status was still under review at the U.S. Commerce Department and that a decision was likely to come in June.
Declaring Russia a market economy would put a U.S. seal of approval on its economic reforms since the collapse of the Soviet Union and provide some momentum to Moscow's bid to join the World Trade Organization.
It would also be of real dollar-and-cents importance to Russia exporters because of U.S. trade laws that make it easier for the Commerce Department to impose steep anti-dumping and countervailing duties on "non-market economies."
Supporters of the change have been encouraged by the Commerce Department's recent decision to reclassify Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic, as a market economy.
The Commerce Department has done the same for Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, Poland and Latvia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and is weighing requests from Ukraine and Moldova as well as Russia.
Putin had also hoped that Washington would lift three-decade-old "Jackson-Vanik" trade restrictions to mark Bush's visit.
But rather than scrapping the restrictions, the U.S. Senate on Wednesday adopted a non-binding resolution calling for the United States to establish permanent normal trade relations with Russia "in an appropriate and timely fashion."
"This is a strange decision," Putin said on Thursday. "People who regard our relations not as U.S.-Russian but U.S.-Soviet still wield a lot of power in the United States."