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 The standoff between the U.S. and Russia over fugitive former security contractor Edward Snowden may threaten a planned summit between Presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin as the case further strains an already frayed relationship. 
 
 With less than two months to go before Obama is scheduled to leave for Russia, administration officials have repeatedly refused to confirm that the president will keep a commitment to meet with Putin for one-on-one talks in Moscow before heading to a Group of 20 nations summit Sept. 5-6 in St. Petersburg. 
 
 “You know that the president and his advisers are asking what kind of a trip he can have to Moscow with such a big gorilla in the room,” said Stephen Sestanovich, who was U.S. ambassador-at-large responsible for policy toward Russia and states of the former Soviet Union from 1997 to 2001. “Anybody involved in planning that trip is sweating bullets.” 
 
 Canceling the summit, announced in June, would deal a blow to Obama administration efforts to smooth relations with Russia and would be a direct challenge to Putin’s prestige. Russia assumed the G-20 presidency for the first time last December and Putin is the host for the group’s annual summit. 
 
 Putin “wants to have the meeting; I don’t think there’s any question about that,” said James Collins, who was U.S. ambassador to Russia from 1997 to 2001. 
 
 Travel Plans 
 
 White House press secretary Jay Carney this week was explicit about the U.S. insistence that Russia expel Snowden, who is holed up in a Moscow airport while seeking asylum, and that discussions with Putin’s government are continuing. When asked whether the Obama-Putin summit will go on as planned, Carney refused to directly answer. 
 
 “The president intends to travel to Russia in September for the G-20 Summit, and I don’t have any further announcements with regard to that travel,” Carney said July 17. Pressed on whether that includes the Moscow stop, he said, “I just have nothing else to say on it.” 
 
 Russia hasn’t received any “official notification” that Obama’s plans have changed, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters today. Russia has never handed anyone over and “won’t do so,” he said. “But neither Snowden nor anyone else should engage in anti-American activity. We hope that the situation won’t affect Russia-U.S. ties.” 
 
 Broader Issues 
 
 While both governments have insisted that the Snowden case shouldn’t upend cooperation on broader issues such as counterterrorism and nuclear proliferation, they remain at odds over a host of other issues. Those include Putin’s support of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and Russia’s prosecution of government critics. 
 
 Carney yesterday called sentencing of anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny to five years in prison for embezzlement “the latest example of a disturbing trend of government actions aimed at suppressing dissent and civil society in Russia.” Navalny was freed today pending appeal. 
 
 Two U.S. Senators, Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Democrat Charles Schumer of New York, introduced a non-binding resolution urging Russia to turn over Snowden to the U.S. If it doesn’t, the resolution says Obama should consider recommending that the G-20 economic summit be held elsewhere. 
 
 ‘Clear Message’ 
 
 “On multiple fronts, Russia is becoming one of the bad actors of the world,” Graham said in a joint statement released today. Schumer said Putin is “too eager to stick a finger in the eye of the United States” and that the U.S. should “send a crystal clear message to President Putin about Russia’s deplorable behavior.” 
 
 By leaving open the question of the summit going forward, the White House has delivered a strong message, said Andrew Kuchins, director of the Russia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. 
 
 “They’re trying to put some squeeze” on Russia, Kuchins said. “This may put a little bit of pressure on Putin to be a little more forthcoming, and deliver” Snowden. 
 
 The Russian leader has an incentive to act to avoid having a previously announced summit with Obama spoiled or casting a shadow over the G-20 gathering, said Sestanovich, now a senior fellow for Russian and Eurasian studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. 
 
 ‘Can’t Win’ 
 
 “Putin can’t win having Snowden on his hands at the beginning of September,” he said. “Any intelligence benefit that they’ve gotten from Snowden’s presence, they’ve already gotten. Any political benefit from tweaking the U.S., they’ve already gotten. Now, it’s just a complication in power politics.” 
 
 Collins, now the director of the Russia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the White House message to Putin is “you have to find a way to deal with this issue” 
 
 Snowden, 30, who exposed classified U.S. programs that collect telephone and Internet data, faces prosecution on espionage and other charges. He applied for temporary asylum this week at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport and has been confined to the transit area there since arriving on a flight from Hong Kong on June 23. The U.S. has revoked his passport. 
 
 Snowden Staying 
 
 “He’s got no intention to go anywhere, he wants to stay here,” Snowden’s Moscow-based lawyer Anatoly Kucherena said in an interview yesterday. Snowden applied for a 12-month renewable refugee status in Russia on July 16. Kucherena said he will be granted temporary permission to enter the country within the next week while authorities continue to process his asylum claim. Federal Migration Authority spokeswoman Zalina Kornilova declined to comment. 
 
 Putin has accused the U.S. of stranding Snowden in Moscow by putting pressure on other countries to prevent his travel through their airspace and deny him refuge in Latin America, where Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia have indicated they’d be willing to take him. 
 
 U.S. officials, from Obama on down, have called on Russia to deliver Snowden into U.S. custody. Obama spoke with Putin by telephone July 12. The two leaders last met June 17 at the Group of Eight Summit in Northern Ireland, a week before Snowden landed at Sheremetyevo Airport. 
 
 Even though the U.S. doesn’t have an extradition treaty with Russia, “it is our view that there is substantial legal justification for him to be returned to the United States,” Carney said, adding, “We don’t want this matter to do harm to our bilateral relations.” 
 
 Putin this week expressed hope that the controversy will blow over. 
 
 “International relations are considerably more important than squabbles between intelligence services,” Putin said. 
 
 To contact the reporter on this story: Roger Runningen in Washington at rrunningen@bloomberg.net 
 
 To contact the editor responsible for this story: Steven Komarow at skomarow1@bloomberg.net ||||| The White House is considering canceling a fall summit between President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, a move that would further aggravate the already tense relationship between the two leaders. 
 
 FILE - In this June 17, 2013, file photo, President Barack Obama meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland. The White House is considering canceling a fall summit between... (Associated Press) 
 
 The White House is dangling that option over the Russians as Moscow considers a temporary asylum petition from Edward Snowden, the American accused of leaking information about classified U.S. intelligence programs. But officials have privately signaled that scrapping the bilateral talks would also be retaliation for other areas of disagreement with Russia, including its continued support for Syrian President Bashar Assad's attacks against civilians. 
 
 Regardless of what happens with Snowden, the White House says Obama will still attend an international summit in St. Petersburg, Russia. But officials have gone out of their way in recent days to avoid publicly committing to the meetings in Moscow. 
 
 "The president intends to travel to Russia for the G20 Summit," White House spokesman Jay Carney said. "And I have no further announcements to make beyond what we've said in the past about the president's travel to Russia in the fall." 
 
 By simply considering cancellation of the trip, the Obama administration is indicating its concern the Kremlin will allow Snowden to take refuge in Russia. The White House has called on Russia to return the 30-year-old former government contract systems analyst to the U.S. where he is facing espionage charges. 
 
 Snowden, in a temporary asylum request submitted by his lawyer Tuesday, claimed he faces persecution from the U.S. government and could face torture or death. 
 
 Andrew Kuchins, director of the Russia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the White House's cancellation threat could be effective leverage over Putin, who likely wants to avoid an embarrassment on the world stage. 
 
 "When the spotlight of the world is on him and Russia, he doesn't want that spotlight to reveal a lot of negative things which are going to be distractions," Kuchins said. 
 
 Pulling the plug on the U.S.-Russia talks would deepen the tensions between the two leaders. And it would likely make it even more difficult for the two countries to find common ground on areas of disagreement that plague the relationship. 
 
 The U.S. accuses Russia of providing military support to Assad that has allowed him to cling to power during more than two years of clashes with rebels seeking to overthrow his government. The U.S. deeply angered Russia earlier this year when it announced sanctions against 18 Russians as part of a law named after Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who was arrested in 2008 for tax evasion after accusing Russian police officials of stealing $230 million in tax rebates. Russia also announced last year that it was banning U.S. adoptions of Russian children, a move seen as a retaliation for the Magnitsky act, passed last year. 
 
 On Thursday, the White House also said it was "deeply disappointed and concerned" by the conviction of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who challenged the Kremlin with exposures of high-level corruption and mocked the leadership with biting satire. He was sentenced to five years in prison Thursday in a verdict that fueled street protests near Red Square and drew condemnation from the West. 
 
 Kuchins said that while granting Snowden asylum would certainly be the impetus for canceling Obama's Moscow trip, it would not be the only reason. 
 
 "It would be saying at least two things to the Russians," Kuchins said. "That granting asylum to Edward Snowden was a bridge too far, and secondly that we don't feel like we're actually losing so much out of the cancellation of the summit because we didn't expect to get much out of it." 
 
 Some U.S. lawmakers are calling on Obama to go beyond simply canceling his talks with Putin. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has also called on the U.S. to boycott next year's Winter Olympics scheduled for Sochi, Russia. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Follow Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC ||||| international relations Obama Laying the Groundwork to Snub Putin Over Snowden 
 
 President Barack Obama has a lot of uncomfortable stuff to talk about with Russian President Vladimir Putin, to the point where he's reportedly thinking about skipping their next one-on-one visit altogether. Mostly this is about Edward Snowden, who is still hanging around the Moscow airport, hoping he can work out some way to leave there without getting shipped back to the United States. Washington journalists have been wondering aloud whether all this would cause Obama to rethink his planned stopover in Moscow as he heads to the G20 summit in St. Petersberg in September. And on Thursday night, the New York Times reported that "officials said he is now rethinking the Moscow stop, not just because of the impasse over Mr. Snowden but because of a growing sense that the two sides cannot agree on other issues enough to justify the meeting." 
 
 In addition to Snowden, the United States is also pretty displeased with the recent embezzlement conviction of Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, as well as Russia's ongoing support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. 
 
 But Snowden is the big sticking point. "You know that the president and his advisers are asking what kind of a trip he can have to Moscow with such a big gorilla in the room," Stephen Sestanovich, a former U.S. ambassador-at-large in charge of Russia policy, told Bloomberg. 
 
 The administration has been noncommittal about the possibility of striking the Moscow leg of the trip: "I can say that the president intends to travel to Russia for the G-20 summit," Spokesman Jay Carney said on Wednesday when asked if Obama would take a pass on Moscow. "I don’t have anything to add to what we’ve said in the past about that trip." If Obama did cancel, it "would be seen as a direct slap at Mr. Putin, who is known to value such high-level visits as a validation of Russian prestige," the Times reports.
– President Obama is still going to Russia this fall to attend a G20 summit, but the White House is now suggesting that he'll back out of a face-to-face meeting with Vladimir Putin in Moscow. All the coverage says it's Obama's way of making clear he's not happy about US-Russia relations at the moment, mostly because of Edward Snowden, but also over things like the sentencing of a top Putin critic to 5 years in prison, and Moscow's support of Syria, reports New York. This is Obama's way of trying to gain some leverage, according to the common refrain in stories: "Canceling the meeting in Moscow would be seen as a direct slap at Mr. Putin, who is known to value such high-level visits as a validation of Russian prestige," says the New York Times. "Canceling the summit, announced in June, would deal a blow to Obama administration efforts to smooth relations with Russia and would be a direct challenge to Putin’s prestige," says Bloomberg, noting that Putin is the current G20 president. "By simply considering cancellation of the trip, the Obama administration is indicating its concern the Kremlin will allow Snowden to take refuge in Russia," says AP.