That, according to today's issue of Time magazine, is the president's nickname for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. At times of tension between the two countries, we are told, Mr Bush is known to tell his staff: "Get me Pootie-Poot on the phone."

Since his days as head cheerleader at a private academy in Andover, Mr Bush has prided himself on his bonhomie, which relies heavily on the use of nicknames.

He refers to his political adviser, Karl Rove, as "Boy Genius" and, as Texas governor, introduced a forest service official as "Tree Man".

The nicknames have helped build his "regular guy" image, but Pootie-Poot sounds more like a throwback to the preppy vocabulary of his father, who was famous for such phrases as "I'm in deep doo-doo".

A presidential nickname is considered a badge of honour among members of Congress and journalists. It suggests you have reached the inner circle.

Mr Putin seems to have worked hard to earn his sobriquet, researching the US president's quirks before their first meeting in Slovenia in June.

The US national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, hailed the relationship between the two men as epoch-making.

"To see the kind of relationship that presidents Bush and Putin have developed and to see Russia firmly anchored in the west," she said, "that's really a dream of 300 years, not just of the post-cold war era".

Time magazine quoted a former Putin aide as saying the Russian leader "devoured an enormous amount of information on Bush and everything related to him".

It seemed to work. Before the Ljubljana encounter, the Bush administration dismissed Mr Putin as a Soviet throwback, but afterwards Mr Bush claimed: "I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul."

Before this week's summit, Mr Bush is apparently doing a bit more research on the Russian soul.

Ms Rice has reportedly given him a reading list including Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

The message underlying the advice is unclear. Perhaps the guilt-ridden axe-murderer of the novel is supposed to be post-Soviet Pootie-Poot in deep doo-doo.