Gorbachev, Bush Discuss Gulf Crisis : Diplomacy: Soviet leader phones the President to relate new ideas. Lithuanian turmoil is also a subject of talk.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev telephoned President Bush this morning to discuss the Persian Gulf crisis and the domestic political turmoil in the Soviet Union.

Bush told reporters during a photo session that his conversation with Gorbachev was “mainly about the gulf” but that they also discussed the Soviet military crackdown in the breakaway republic of Lithuania.

Bush said the United States and the Soviets “remain in sync” on the gulf situation. When asked if Gorbachev requested more time to allow sanctions against Iraq to force President Saddam Hussein to pull his occupying troops from Kuwait, he said, “No.”

Asked if Gorbachev had any new proposals on the gulf, Bush said that “you can assume he was thinking innovatively.”

“He had some ideas he wanted to discuss with me,” Bush said, but said he would keep that confidential.

“All of us are trying to think if there’s something we can do” to get Iraq to comply with the United Nations-imposed sanctions, he said.

Bush also met with the Soviet ambassador at the White House and left open the possibility of a follow-up phone conversation with Gorbachev.

On the situation in Lithuania, Bush said he reiterated his concerns, expressed in a public statement last week, that Soviet military action there was “provocative and counterproductive.”

“He knows of my position” and the fact that the United States does not recognize the Soviet forcible incorporation of the three Baltic republics into the Soviet Union, Bush said.