Crises Said Likely to Delay Bush-Gorbachev Summit

The U.S.-Soviet summit conference scheduled to begin in four weeks in Moscow is now likely to be postponed, a victim of the twin crises in Lithuania and the Persian Gulf, the White House said Monday.

“Clearly, the trip to Moscow is up in the air. I think there’s a general skepticism now that we would go,” White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said. The White House also held out the prospects that stepped-up economic aid to the Soviet Union may be in jeopardy.

One day before the United Nations’ deadline for Iraq to pull its troops out of Kuwait or face the use of force to expel them, President Bush and his senior advisers found themselves juggling a second major international dilemma: The violent repression of the independent Lithuanian government by the Soviet army, and the prospects that nearly six years of steadily improving U.S.-Soviet relations would, at the worst possible moment, suddenly turn sour.

The Soviet move on Sunday to install a Committee for National Salvation as the central authority in Lithuania came barely one month after President Bush announced that as much as $1 billion in loan guarantees would be given to Moscow to buy U.S. agricultural products, and that he and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev would meet in Moscow Feb. 11-13.

The offer of the U.S. government credits, which guarantee repayment of commercial loans used to buy agricultural products, reflected U.S. support for the democratization over which Gorbachev was presiding.

Fitzwater said that of the $1 billion in credits, $200 million remains to be tapped for agricultural purchases. He said no decision had been made on whether this money would continue to be available.

Because the credits were offered by presidential order, rather than by an act of Congress, Bush has the authority to suspend the order without congressional action.

At a meeting with congressional leaders Monday afternoon, the President was urged by Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) to cancel the summit and suspend remaining credits.

“Our farmers are not blood merchants,” Dole said, suggesting farmers would not object although the move could cut into their sales to the Soviet Union.

Bush was said by participants to have made no comment about the two suggestions.

According to Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), Byrd observed that the Soviet Union needed Western aid and said it should be made aware by the Administration that the assistance was not unconditional.

Referring to the deaths that occured after Soviet troops and tanks were used to storm a television station and transmitting tower in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, early Sunday morning, Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) said in a Senate speech, “This killing simply cannot be justified, any more than the Chinese government’s slaughter of innocents in Tian An Men Square.”

Staff writer William J. Eaton contributed to this report.