Washington ? President Bush will meet with Vladimir Putin in February to try to salvage the “good personal relationship” that Bush insists he still has and still wants with the beleaguered but defiant Russian president.

The meeting, to be held in Slovakia, will stir controversy at home for both men. Bush will have to defend meeting with Putin despite the Russian leader’s open meddling in Ukraine’s elections, the Kremlin’s sleazy shakedown of the Yukos oil company and the steady shrinking of openness and pluralism inside Russia.

But the summit should go ahead because of — not despite — those events. They bring Putin to a fork in the road: He can recognize the indelible reality that his way is not working and needs to be changed. Or he can continue down the path he travels toward self-isolation and eventual ruin for Russia’s ambitions to integrate smoothly into the global economy and the community of democracies.

An American president’s role in such a moment is to exert constructive influence on a foreign leader to do the right things. At this summit, Bush should lay out a broad global security agenda in which the United States and Russia can cooperate — if Putin can overcome his mistakes and the rising bitterness of Russian nationalist frustrations.

Bush will no doubt be mocked at home for continuing to see good in a Russian autocrat who has, it can be fairly argued, betrayed the American’s faith in the transparency and goodness of his soul.

But at his year-end news conference on Monday, Bush told reporters that he is not prepared to give up on the relationship, which has survived the abrogation of the ABM treaty, the expansion of NATO into the Baltics and conflict over Russia’s war against Chechen secessionists and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

“Vladimir Putin and I have got a good personal relationship, starting with our meeting in Slovenia” in June 2001, Bush said. “I intend to keep it that way.”

The White House announced agreement on Tuesday to add the U.S.-Russian summit on Feb. 24 to a Bush visit to NATO and the European Union in Brussels. The next day Bush will meet Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in Germany on a trip that will highlight Bush’s foreign policy ambitions for his second term.

Putin also will face questioning at home about resuming a high-level U.S.-Russian dialogue in the wake of Ukraine’s Dec. 26 runoff election, which challenger Viktor Yushchenko is favored to win, to the delight of democrats in the West.

The “loss” of Ukraine represents the most significant failure for Putin in his policies toward former Soviet republics. As it did in Georgia’s “rose revolution” earlier this year, the Kremlin badly misread the outcome of the “orange revolution” led by Yushchenko.

Russia seems to have been misled by outgoing Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma on his ability to deliver a sure victory for a pro-Kremlin candidate, even though the Moscow media portrays the political defeats in Georgia and Ukraine as part of a Western plot to weaken Russia in its “near abroad.”

But U.S. and foreign officials note that the Kremlin had in recent days privately shifted ground and begun to talk with Washington and Berlin about damage limitation in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Putin gave public voice to this change of tone Tuesday when he said that he was prepared to work with Yushchenko. “If he wins, I don’t see any problems,” Putin said at a news conference in Germany. He also voiced new openness to outside involvement in Chechnya.

The Yukos scandal and Putin’s domestic political intrigues betray a vindictiveness that could sink U.S.-Russian relations into a festering morass instead of the positive approach those words suggest. Putin’s determination to run over others as he pursues a chimeric national security state is not a promising characteristic.

But as Putin discovered in Ukraine this month, little is certain in the still-shifting landscape of the former Soviet Union. That is reason enough for Bush to add a summit with Putin to his European journey later this winter.

— Jim Hoagland is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.