MOSCOW - United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Wednesday praised President Vladimir Putin for trying to bring the Indian and Pakistani leaders together for face-to-face talks, amid worldwide fears their conflict over Kashmir is heading toward war.

"I want to thank you for the efforts you made" to mediate at an Asian security conference in Kazakhstan, Annan told the Russian leader during talks in the Kremlin.

"I was amused to hear them say President Putin failed to make peace ... when the actual situation was that the two leaders failed to seize the opportunity offered by the conference," he said.

In his first attempted venture at international peacemaking, Putin tried - without success - to get Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to sit down for direct talks at the Almaty conference this week. The two nuclear-armed neighbors are locked in a tense standoff over the disputed Himalayan province of Kashmir.

The Indian and Pakistani leaders did join other regional leaders at a long conference table in Almaty but angrily blamed each other for more than five decades of conflict.

The two countries have 1 million soldiers deployed along their common frontier and frequently exchange artillery and gun fire across the Kashmir border. Vajpayee has said he is willing to talk with Pakistan, but demands that Pakistan first halt cross-border terrorism in India-controlled Kashmir.

On Wednesday, Vajpayee called on Pakistan to jointly monitor their disputed Kashmir border. Pakistan played down the conciliatory offer as nothing new and unlikely to work in the current climate of tension.

Despite the lack of a breakthrough at the summit, Putin said his diplomatic efforts were not in vain. "Many of our partners said maybe today it would be premature, that the domestic political situation in both countries is such that a meeting could upset a delicate balance," he told Annan.

"The most important thing was that they agreed to the principle of resolving the conflict without using force ... they gave us what we could interpret as positive signs giving us hope," he said.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko said Russia's mediation efforts had sent a signal to India and Pakistan that the world was watching the situation in the region carefully. He said Russia would continue its mediation efforts.

Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Losyukov said Musharraf would visit Moscow this year. The Pakistani leader accepted an invitation from Putin during the Almaty summit, but no date has been announced.

Losyukov said that, given the situation in the region, it would not be wise to delay it, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency.

Meanwhile, Annan also met with Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov. Their talks focused on the situation in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Iraq, the Foreign Ministry said. After the talks, Ivanov awarded Annan a Russian diplomacy award.

Earlier Wednesday, Annan visited a medical clinic to draw attention to efforts to combat the growing AIDS epidemic in the former Soviet Union.