Soviets Back Bush in Calling on GIs : Diplomacy: But it shies away from any hint that its forces might join the multinational military action.

The Soviet Union gave tacit approval Wednesday to President Bush’s order sending U.S. troops and warplanes to halt further aggression by Iraq but shied away from any hint that its armed forces might join in the multinational military action.

The trade embargo against Iraq decreed by the U.N. Security Council is “a more effective weapon to halt aggression than all the armed might Washington is deploying in the Persian Gulf,” commentator V. Lovachenko declared as state-run television aired footage of GIs leaving for the Middle East.

Nonetheless, a U.S. diplomat reported Wednesday evening that an “enormous number of contacts” between his American and Soviet colleagues were under way at all levels as the search continued for effective ways to pressure Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait and dissuade it from attacking Saudi Arabia.

Last Friday, the superpowers committed themselves to working together for an international arms embargo of Iraq, a precedent-setting decision that aligned the Soviet Union with the United States and against one of its longtime friends in the Arab world.

Soviet spokesmen had said earlier that two of their country’s warships--an anti-submarine ship and a command vessel--were on their way to the Strait of Hormuz from the Indian Ocean to protect Soviet merchant shipping. That news immediately sparked speculation that the Soviet navy would join an international blockade of the Iraqis, but an official of the Communist Party’s policy-making Central Committee dismissed such thinking.

“Our navy is simply not equipped for this sort of operation,” he said. “However, I have no doubt that many of our captains, just like in America, are wringing their hands with eagerness to get involved.”

The last man to lead Soviet troops in battle, Col. Gen. Boris Gromov, the former Red Army commander in Afghanistan, told reporters he did not think any sort of military action would be necessary to end the crisis ignited by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

“About cooperation between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A., I think it won’t happen, because the United Nations and the world community and common sense in Iraq will triumph,” Gromov said. “And the conflict in Iraq will end well and peacefully.”

Gromov, almost certainly his country’s most distinguished field commander, held an impromptu news conference on a firing range that was visited by Western correspondents near Chernigov, part of the Kiev Military District in the Ukraine that he now commands.

“Vremya,” state-run TV’s evening news program, gave a straightforward account of Bush’s decision to dispatch U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia to forestall any Iraqi attack and coldly weighed the pluses and minuses.

On the positive side, Lovachenko said, 200 U.S. military planes and thousands of GIs who are expected to arrive in Saudi Arabia within a few days are a “restraining factor” on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. On the other hand, Lovachenko said, they are too few to seriously challenge Iraq’s 1-million-man army.

Such commentary was a far cry from the way the Soviets in the past reacted to a show of U.S. military muscle in the Persian Gulf or elsewhere, which the Kremlin usually condemned as more American imperialism or “gunboat diplomacy.”

Interestingly, more authoritative Soviet reaction was not immediately forthcoming, perhaps because, with President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and other top leaders out of Moscow on vacation, officials could not decide what to say.

As one indication of befuddlement, there was this incident: The Foreign Ministry’s Information Department told callers there would be a news briefing at 3 p.m., at which reporters would be able to ask for official Soviet comment on Bush’s action, but reporters subsequently received telephone calls informing them the briefing had been canceled.

Writing before Bush’s announcement, the military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) said the joint superpower approach on Iraq means the United States and Soviet Union have finally realized their “special responsibility for the world’s destiny.”

But presumably echoing the views of a Soviet general staff chastened by the bloody experience of the Afghan war, the newspaper’s observer, Vasily Pustov, cautioned that any military operation in the Persian Gulf would pose big problems and could touch off “large-scale warfare.”

In the same vein, “Vremya” recalled that Iraq has stocks of poison gas and had not hesitated to use them with horrifying results during the Iran-Iraq War.

Claims by the once Moscow-allied Iraqi government that it had withdrawn from Kuwait were brushed off as “eyewash” by Krasnaya Zvezda since, as it said, a “puppet government” and an obedient army containing Iraqi volunteers were being left behind.

Staff writer Carey Goldberg contributed from Chernigov.