IHT - Putin expected to focus on energy in Dutch visit | Nov. 3, 2005 |

AMSTERDAM Nov. 2 -- Putin and his wife, Lyudmila, were welcomed by Queen Beatrix and her son, Crown Prince Willem Alexander, at the airport, and the group then drove to the royal palace in Amsterdam. Putin walked across Dam Square to pay respects to Dutch war victims at the national monument. The police had sealed off the square in the center of the Dutch capital hours before.

The Russian president was also to visit Zaandam, a town where Czar Peter the Great spent several months in 1697 studying Dutch shipbuilding.

Putin was repaying a 2001 state visit by Queen Beatrix. He had been due to visit in 2002, but the trip was postponed when terrorists seized 800 hostages at a Moscow theater in a siege that ended with 170 people dead.

Although Putin has made business trips to the Netherlands before, it is the first state visit by a Russian leader since Czar Alexander II in 1874.

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'Sapere aude'