WASHINGTON, May 31 — A top Russia expert at the State Department issued an unusually sharp public criticism on Thursday of Moscow’s behavior under President Vladimir V. Putin, describing the Kremlin as bullying its neighbors while silencing political opponents and suppressing individual rights at home.

The comments, approved by the White House, are the latest volley of criticism between Washington and Moscow in recent days. Although the White House said this week that President Bush would play host to Mr. Putin on July 1 at the Bush family compound in Maine, the speech is likely to add tension at a time when the broader dialogue between Washington and Moscow is already taking the most caustic tones since the collapse of communism.

“We do no one any favors, least of all the Russian people and even their government, by abstaining from speaking out when necessary,” the Russia expert, David Kramer, the deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, said in a speech Thursday night before the Baltimore Council on Foreign Affairs.

The speech came a day after Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia accused the United States of fomenting a dangerous new arms race and implicitly threatened to block any effort by the United States and Europe to win broader diplomatic recognition for Kosovo. On Thursday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a scholar of Russian affairs, used a speech in Potsdam, Germany, to describe the American-Russian relationship as one of “cooperation and competition, of friendship and friction.”