US President Barack Obama heads to Moscow on Sunday promising a far-reaching effort to reset US-Russia relations that hit a post-Cold War low under the Bush administration.

Obama is expected to clinch summit deals on the outlines of a new nuclear arms pact and improved cooperation in the Afghan war effort, but deep divisions will remain over US missile defence, NATO expansion and the 2008 Russia-Georgia war.

Travelling to Moscow for the first time since taking office, he hopes to keep building pragmatic ties with President Dmitry Medvedev but is likely to have a more strained introduction to Vladimir Putin, who still dominates Russian politics. Obama set the stage with a pre-trip assessment that Putin still had one foot planted in the Cold War. Putin rejected Obama’s criticism and said it was US policy that needed to be updated.

Despite the testy exchange, the two sides have settled on the old issue of arms control as the cornerstone for forging a less rancorous relationship between Washington and Moscow. “I seek to reset relations with Russia because I believe that Americans and Russians have many common interests, interests that our governments recently have not pursued as actively as we could have,” Obama told the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta.