Near the end of the interview, Rice ventured briefly into Russian, but then commented that she was out of practice and switched back to English. A listener said she had misused one verb but described the secretary of State as speaking the language fluently and with a slight, but pleasant, accent.
She also appeared initially to misunderstand a question about whether she planned to run for president in 2008. Answering in Russian: "President? Yes," she then quickly switched to an emphatic, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no!"
Rice later told reporters that she had stressed in her meetings with Lavrov and Putin that the U.S. did not view improved American ties with democracies around Russia's borders as an attempt to challenge Moscow but rather as "the normal development of the United States with fully independent states."
Although Rice said she believed that "the Russians took that on board," analysts in Moscow expressed some skepticism.
"The proof of the pudding will be in the eating," commented Dmitry Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.
Rice departed late Wednesday for the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, where she will attend a meeting of foreign ministers from member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
