Soviets Will Not Escort Kuwaitis in Gulf, Envoy Says

Soviet Ambassador Yuri V. Dubinin, disputing President Reagan’s assertion of the previous day, said Tuesday that his country has only a minor military presence in the Persian Gulf and has no intention of providing military escorts for Kuwaiti oil tankers.

Soviet policy, Dubinin insisted, “is to diminish the tension in the region . . . not to increase the military presence but just the contrary, to diminish military presence in this region.”

Reagan, defending his controversial policy of providing U.S. military escorts for 11 Kuwaiti oil tankers in the gulf, told the nation in a televised address Monday night that “if we don’t do the job, the Soviets will.” He warned of the prospect that the Soviets would “move into this chokepoint of the Free World’s oil flow.”

Moreover, White House Chief of Staff Howard H. Baker Jr. and other Administration officials told reporters during last week’s economic summit meeting in Venice that the Soviets already had agreed to Kuwaiti requests to provide military escorts for their tankers.

But Dubinin, interviewed at a Times Washington Bureau breakfast session, denied that the Soviets had agreed to any such request.

“There is absolutely nothing in Soviet policy in this sense of escorting any tankers,” he said. The Soviet military presence in the gulf, he added, is “practically non-existent.”

Dubinin’s statement about the current Soviet presence seemed to be confirmed by Defense Department spokesman Robert Sims. At a briefing Tuesday, Sims said that the Soviet presence consists of one minesweeper, with two other minesweepers operating in the nearby Gulf of Oman and two or three destroyers paying sporadic visits to the Persian Gulf.

The United States has six fighting ships in the gulf now, including the Stark, which was disabled by Iraqi missiles last month, and it plans soon to replace those six with eight other warships. In addition, a carrier battle group stationed near the gulf in the Indian Ocean will provide air protection for the tankers, the Defense Department reported Tuesday, and the Pentagon is also considering moving a battleship group to the area.

The President has pressed his policy in the gulf despite heavy bipartisan criticism. Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger called it “a bad idea to get ourselves militarily involved,” and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) advised Reagan to delay implementing the policy because of “the lack of consensus we have right now.”

Dubinin, an affable 56-year-old career diplomat who replaced the veteran Anatoly F. Dobrynin as ambassador to Washington last May, spoke mostly in English during the 90-minute interview but occasionally reverted to Russian and depended on a translator. Periodically smiling and joking, he sometimes disagreed with his aide’s translation and once, needling him, said: “He learned his English in an English school.”

Chance for Arms Accord

The ambassador spoke optimistically about the prospects for a U.S.-Soviet agreement to sharply curb medium- and short-range nuclear missiles in Europe. If both the United States and the Soviets “work hard,” he said, it will be possible to eliminate such missiles by September or October and to schedule a summit meeting between Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev soon thereafter.

But he noted that there are still obstacles to reaching a final agreement on such an approach, known as the “zero-zero” option. Among them, he listed the U.S. position that West Germany must be permitted to retain its own force of 72 Pershing 1A missiles, which carry U.S.-controlled nuclear warheads.

“There are all kinds of conditions that turn these zeros into spiked zeros,” he said. “. . . For example, the question of nuclear warheads for West German missiles. Well, what is the right of West Germans to demand nuclear warheads? They are American, and how (can you) leave these American nuclear warheads in Europe and speak about zero?”

Administration officials have told reporters that the Soviets would not let the West German missiles stand in the way of reaching an agreement. But Dubinin insisted: “It is our feeling that it is necessary to achieve real zero in Europe for both intermediate-range missiles and shorter-range missiles.”

Separately, a senior American official said Tuesday that U.S. diplomats in Moscow have been informed of another possible obstacle to an accord on medium- and short-range missiles.

According to the official, who asked not to be named, a high-level Soviet Foreign Ministry official now says that Secretary of State George P. Shultz may have misunderstood Gorbachev last April when the two met in Moscow. Shultz reported after that meeting that Gorbachev had proposed the elimination of all short-range weapons worldwide, not only in Europe.

The American official suggested that the Soviets have raised the possibility of a misunderstanding as a tactical maneuver to gain advantage in the final stages of the negotiations. Nonetheless, the development in Moscow--coupled with Dubinin’s remarks here--suggest that at least some problems remain.

Dubinin, asked in his interview with The Times about the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, said: “We are trying more and more to . . . somehow alleviate this situation.”

He said that Gorbachev, in a recent interview with an Italian Communist newspaper, spelled out the Soviet Union’s concern and its hopes for a solution to the Afghanistan problem. He added: “We are closely watching the development of the national reconciliation policy that is being implemented by the Afghan government.”

The leader of the ruling Communist Party of Afghanistan recently said that the party was “indeed ready to share power,” Dubinin said, and “we think it is a very important statement.”

On immigration issues, Dubinin indirectly acknowledged that as many as 20,000 Soviet Jews want to leave the Soviet Union and said that applications for exit visas are being reviewed at an accelerated pace under a a new law that went into effect last Jan. 1.

“There is an opinion that 400,000 want to leave,” he said. “The real figure is about 20 times less.”

Referring to a document, he said that 2,358 Jews were allowed to leave the country in the first four months of 1987 and that 799 other cases were “under consideration” as of May 1. The fact that he had such figures at his fingertips, he said, “shows how carefully they are being considered.”

Western analysts and Jewish organizations have voiced fears, however, that after an initial surge in emigration, restrictive clauses in the new law may actually throttle emigration back to even lower levels than in recent years. For purposes of family reunification, for example, the law requires applicants to have direct blood relatives, such as a mother or brother, living abroad.

Staff writer Robert C. Toth also contributed to this story.