Sun shines on Dubya and his new best friend

President George Bush and his good friend Vladimir Putin yesterday left aside scepticism over their "fast-food" missile treaty and took a tour of St Petersburg, Mr Putin's home town, where the sun scarcely sets at this time of year.

The two leaders, after dining and spending the night at Mr Putin's dacha outside Moscow, flew early yesterday to St Petersburg, formerly Leningrad, where Mr Putin was born in 1952 and later joined the KGB. The first stop was a memorial to the 600,000 citizens of the city who died during the Second World War siege, after which Mr Putin showed Mr Bush around some of the treasures of the Hermitage, the green-painted palace on the Neva river, with its Rembrandts and two paintings by Leonardo da Vinci.

The signing of the so-called Treaty of Moscow in the Kremlin the day before led to slightly more acerbic exchanges over Iran than had been expected between the American and Russian leaders. "The protocol part was smashing, but the quick-cooked triumph was marred by some barbs on issues supposed to be lying at the core of the new partnership," said Novy Izvestia.

While both leaders are determined to maintain an upbeat mood of unrelenting cheerfulness, the treaty cutting deployed strategic missiles by two thirds is short on details. The reduction from 6,000-7,000 warheads to between 1,700 and 2,200 over 10 years will be achieved by "deep freezing" the warheads, not destroying them.

Mr Putin may have wanted to protect himself from allegations that he was being over-conciliatory to the US by responding sharply to Mr Bush's charge that Russian help in building a nuclear power station in Iran would enable the Iranians to build nuclear weapons. The Russian leader said the US was building a similar reactor in North Korea.

Mr Bush, who was greeted by thousands of demonstrators in Berlin and can expect an equal number in Paris, his next stop, encountered small knots of protesters on his way to St Petersburg state university, where he and Mr Putin took questions from students, just as they did at Crawford High School near Mr Bush's Texas ranch. In the evening they were to cruise the Neva on a boat called New Island to look at the city.