Obama to ABC News: U.S.-Russia Ties Are 'Reset' but Now Comes the 'Hard Work'

President Barack Obama delivers a speech at the graduation ceremony of the New Economic School in...

President Barack Obama delivers a speech at the graduation ceremony of the New Economic School in Moscow on July 7, 2009. Obama said the United States wanted a strong, prosperous but also democratic Russia, as he set out his vision of the U.S. relationship with its former Cold-War era foe.

(SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

On Michael Jackson's Funeral: 'At Some Point People Will Start Focusing Again on Things Like Nuclear Weapons'

Having joked that he'd have to discuss Michael Jackson in order to get media coverage of the U.S.-Russian summit, the president said he wasn't at all irritated by the media attention to the funeral of the King of Pop.

"You know, this is part of American culture," the president said. "Michael Jackson, like Elvis, like Sinatra, when somebody who's captivated the imagination of the country for that long passes away, people pay attention. And I assume at some point, people will start focusing again on things like nuclear weapons."

The last time Obama was in Russia was in 2005, when then-Sen. Obama was part of a congressional delegation visiting future nuclear weapons sites.

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At the time, the president recalled, "you had already started to see the Russian public concerned less with democracy and human rights than they were in consumption and a growing economy." Obama said that "there was a renewed confidence that in some ways had pushed those other issues out to the side."

But in conversations with President Medvedev on this trip, Obama said, he's convinced that "there is a growing recognition that if they want to diversity their economy, continuing to develop the entrepreneurs of the sort that I just spoke to at this graduation, that issues like rule of law, transparency, democracy are going to continue to be important."

Obama predicted that after what he called Russia's "wild swings" since the 1990s, "you're starting to see Russia balance out. And I think that they want to pursue economic growth but I think that they recognize that some of the nagging issues around civil society still have to be fixed."