Bush Trip Winds Down In Georgia

(CBS/AP)  President Bush arrived to a lavish welcome Monday in Georgia, a former Soviet republic looking to the U.S. as a powerful friend as it tries to maneuver out of Russia's orbit.

Mr. Bush was greeted in Tbilisi by giant billboards bearing his image, U.S. flags and a spruced-up city center. The freshly paved roads where Georgians kicked soccer balls a day earlier were emptied, as police shooed pedestrians away. But few complained.

"When the leader of today's free world turns his attention to you, you should be proud," said Katya Chichua, 50, as she surveyed workers laying intricately patterned rugs on a stage in Tbilisi's old town.

The White House has said the trip is a chance to praise rising pro-democracy sentiment in the former Soviet sphere — a movement Georgians proudly claim to have started with their peaceful 2003 Rose Revolution.

Earlier Monday, Mr. Bush took a place of honor in a once-unthinkable setting – amid symbols of Soviet power in Moscow's Red Square, as he saluted the greatest military victory of an empire formerly regarded as America's most-threatening enemy.

Goose-stepping Red Army troops belted out songs of the Second World War as they marched in celebration of the defeat of Nazi Germany 60 years ago, CBS News Correspondent Bill Plante reports.

Jet fighters roared overhead and elderly veterans evoked the memory of Russia's 27 million dead in the war. The Soviet hammer and sickle insignia streamed past the reviewing stand filled with world leaders.

Russian President Vladimir Putin emphasized the Soviet Union's massive sacrifice, saying his country would never forget the debt owed to the tens of millions of Soviet citizens who died to defeat Nazism.

"I bow low before all veterans of the Great Patriotic War," said the Russian leader, using his country's term for World War II. He described May 9, 1945 — marked in Russia as Victory Day — as "a day of victory of good over evil, freedom over tyranny."

The ceremony posed some difficulty for Mr. Bush who has made democracy's spread the singular foreign-policy cause of his second term. Nonetheless, the two put aside their public sniping of recent days over postwar Soviet domination and present-day democratic backsliding in Russia.

Mr. Bush caused consternation among some Russian officials by preceding the Moscow ceremonies with meetings with the leaders of the Baltic states who are demanding an apology for Soviet annexation after World War II.

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