Baker, Bessmertnykh to Talk; Summit Hangs in Balance : Diplomacy: Recent violence in the Baltics has jeopardized a February Bush-Gorbachev meeting. Foreign minister will be in Washington this weekend.

With next month’s scheduled U.S.-Soviet summit hanging in the balance, Secretary of State James A. Baker III will confer Saturday with newly appointed Soviet Foreign Minister Alexander A. Bessmertnykh, the State Department said Thursday.

It will be the first Baker-Bessmertnykh meeting since the Soviet official was chosen to replace Eduard A. Shevardnadze earlier this month. But the two officials know each other well because Bessmertnykh was the Soviet ambassador to Washington before his appointment as foreign minister.

President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev have scheduled a Feb. 11-13 summit in Moscow. But the Soviet crackdown in the Baltic states has chilled the post-Cold War relationship between the superpowers and cast doubt on whether the summit will take place as planned.

White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said that Bush still hopes to visit Moscow next month, although the meeting may have to be postponed for a few weeks. With the Persian Gulf War occupying most of Bush’s time, he may find it difficult to stick with the present summit time schedule.

State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said that Baker and Bessmertnykh would meet Saturday at the State Department. She said that there are no plans for Bessmertnykh to meet Bush this weekend, although she left open the possibility that the Soviet foreign minister would visit the White House early next week.

Bush was planning to spend the weekend at Camp David, Md., the presidential retreat.

At a meeting with Republican House and Senate leaders, Bush was advised to reconsider whether he should meet Gorbachev so soon after Soviet tanks and troops attacked citizens and local officials in the independence-minded republics of Lithuania and Latvia, Fitzwater said.

However, a senior White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the “pre-eminent complication” threatening the planned summit is the Persian Gulf War.

In addition, Fitzwater said that Administration officials continue to have “some real differences” with the Soviets on arms control issues.

At the time the summit was scheduled, both governments expected to have a treaty ready for signature that would cut superpower arsenals of long-range nuclear weapons by more than one-third. Although most articles of the pact were agreed upon months ago, U.S. and Soviet negotiators have been unable to settle a few nagging details.

Negotiating teams headed by U.S. Undersecretary of State Reginald Bartholomew and Soviet delegate Alexei Obhukov have been meeting in Washington all this week.

Tutwiler quoted Bartholomew as saying cryptically: “Work remains.”

In addition to unresolved questions about the proposed Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the Administration wants to explore reports that the Soviets are trying to circumvent a treaty signed last November to drastically reduce conventional weaponry in Europe. Moscow appears to have transferred large numbers of tanks and other weapons into Soviet Central Asia, a region of the country that is not covered by the treaty, instead of destroying them.

U.S. officials say that moving the weapons might satisfy the letter of the treaty but that the action clearly violates its intent. The controversy could damage chances for ratification of the conventional forces pact.

Despite the new strains in the U.S.-Soviet relationship, the senior White House official said that Bush and Gorbachev continue to share similar views of the gulf conflict.

Although Gorbachev earlier this week urged Washington to avoid inflicting excessive civilian casualties and to refrain from taking the war deep into Iraq, the White House official said that Bush has detected no softening of Soviet support for the U.S. war effort.

The official said that Bush is genuinely outraged at Soviet repression in the Baltics. But he said the United States has only limited leverage to affect the outcome of what Moscow considers an internal dispute.

“What we’re trying to do is weigh the action of what might be taken in terms of more concretely demonstrating our unhappiness” with Soviet action, the official said. But he said the Administration does not want to damage the reform process that Gorbachev continues to give at least rhetorical support.

“We’re wrestling with this,” the official said. “It’s not an easy matter. There are a lot of conflicting interests. We don’t know whether this is a pause in perestroika. “