From PressTV

Condoleezza Rice the US Secretary of State has said Washington and its European allies were ‘very concerned’ about the Kremlin’s policy.

The concentration of power amassed by President Vladimir Putin has been ‘troubling,’ she told Congress shortly after the Russian leader and US President 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,” she said ahead of a visit to Moscow next week.

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.’

Russian officials later told the US embassy in Moscow that ‘there was no intent’ by Putin to draw a parallel between US policies and the Nazi era, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

Putin’s speech still struck a confrontational note ahead of the talks in Moscow next week between Rice and senior Russian leaders, including Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and possibly the president.

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.