Moscow ? President Vladimir Putin said Thursday he valued his partnership with President Bush but voiced suspicion that the United States might be behind what the Kremlin saw as efforts to isolate Russia — and even destabilize it.

With Russia already feeling hemmed in by U.S. bases in formerly Soviet Central Asia and U.S. military trainers in Georgia, Putin has taken issue with Western and particularly U.S. activism in Ukraine, where the presidential election that sparked a monthlong crisis enters a third round this weekend.

His emotions came boiling to the surface during a three-hour Kremlin news conference, during which he took questions from 51 journalists.

Putin was asked for a reaction to an interview in which Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski said that “for every superpower, Russia without Ukraine is better than Russia with Ukraine.”

“If we interpret this (statement by Kwasniewski) as striving to limit Russia’s ability to develop relations with its neighbors, then it means a desire to isolate the Russian Federation,” Putin said testily.

“I don’t think that is the goal of U.S. policy,” he said, but added he would ask Bush about it in February when they meet in Slovakia. Putin then blamed the United States, without elaborating, for a policy on Chechnya “aimed at creating elements that would destabilize the Russian Federation.”

The comments were in line with Putin’s increasingly combative attitude toward the West and especially the United States. The Kremlin is convinced the United States is behind a campaign to install Ukraine’s pro-Western opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko at the helm of the nation Russia always has regarded as its main satellite. Putin has backed Yushchenko’s opponent, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych.

Analysts close to the Kremlin have accused Poland of working in Ukraine at the behest of the United States.