Risks for Bush: Yeltsin Talks, Ukraine Visit

In two unprecedented diplomatic overtures, President Bush plans to visit the headquarters of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin and give a speech to the rebellious Parliament of the Ukraine during his visit to the Soviet Union next week--moves that will place him squarely in the middle of the country’s explosive internal struggles.

The idea, officials said, is to show that the United States wants to deal directly with the Soviet Union’s 15 increasingly independent republics as well as the central government of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

At the same time, they said, Bush wants to encourage the republics’ leaders to negotiate their futures peacefully with Moscow.

But some officials worry that the effort could backfire, either by encouraging the republics to press harder for secession--or, if Bush fails to back their pleas for independence, by convincing them that the United States is siding with Gorbachev.

“If the President tells the Ukrainians, ‘You have to make a deal with Gorbachev,’ he will lose a lot of good will,” one official warned. “If he emphasizes . . . the Ukrainians’ right to self-determination, that encourages them to seek independence--and that causes problems with Moscow.”

Soviet diplomats confessed that they are worried, too. “Personally, I wish your President were going somewhere else,” said one. “But we hope that, in his meetings, he will emphasize the importance of his relationship with Gorbachev and support the integrity of the Soviet Union.”

Bush’s visit to the Ukrainian Parliament in Kiev will mark the first time any president has made a point of visiting one of the 14 non-Russian republics. (Both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard M. Nixon met with Soviet leaders at the Ukrainian Black Sea resort of Yalta, but those summits had nothing to do with the Ukraine.)

His visit to Yeltsin, the elected president of the Russian Federation, will be unusual because Bush is going to Yeltsin’s Kremlin office, a symbolic act of respect. (Yeltsin met with Bush in the White House earlier this year, but the protocol of that visit--a regional leader visiting a chief of state--was more normal.)

In both cases, Bush will be walking a political tightrope. The Ukrainian Parliament, despite its Communist Party majority, has become a hotbed of nationalist sentiment and has put off until this fall any discussion of Gorbachev’s new Union Treaty defining the republics’ relationship with Moscow. And Yeltsin, while cooperating with Gorbachev, has polarized the political situation in Russia by abruptly outlawing Communist Party activities in factories and other workplaces.

Aides said that Bush hopes to persuade all sides to continue working toward a peaceful agreement--an implicit endorsement of Gorbachev’s approach. The Soviet president announced on Wednesday that he had reached agreement with the leaders of most of the Soviet Union’s 15 republics on a draft Union Treaty, although some provisions are still under negotiation.

“The message will be: For all of your sakes, you need to work this out,” the senior official said. “To the extent that we can help without becoming part of the internal problem, fine.”

Bush will not openly endorse the Union Treaty, because it is “an internal matter”--but the Administration considers the treaty negotiations “a quite positive development,” he said.

“We’re not issuing seals of approval on internal affairs; we just think that as this society opens up, we’re going to need contacts with the republics as well as with the center,” the official explained. “We want to do it in a way that doesn’t affect relations with the center.

“We’re spending, I’d say, 90% of our meeting time with President Gorbachev,” he added. “I think the President feels quite strongly that we have done some spectacular things with President Gorbachev, and there’s still much to do. At the same time, we realize that there are other political leaders.”

Jeremy Azrael, a Soviet expert at Santa Monica’s RAND Corp., said that the Administration’s approach “sounds very sensible.”

“The United States is moving away from a totally centrist (Moscow-oriented) position and adapting to a dynamic that is irreversible,” Azrael said. “The dust isn’t going to settle on this issue for a long time. But it sounds as if the Administration is positioning itself to pursue a range of options, depending on what happens.”

Bush’s views could have a significant impact on the Soviets’ behavior, both in Moscow and in the republics, he said. “The signals we give are terribly important,” he said. “It’s important to tell Gorbachev that we support the kind of thing Yeltsin is doing, the pressure for democratization and decommunization. At the same time, it’s important to tell Yeltsin to shape up and get along with Gorbachev.”

In that sense, Azrael added, the United States is already “deeply involved in their internal affairs”--despite the Administration’s protests.

But not everyone believes Bush’s tightrope act can work.

“Our policy isn’t sustainable,” one Administration official complained. “You can have a liberal Russia, you can have a liberal Ukraine, but you can’t have a liberal Soviet Union. . . . Democracy means letting the republics go off on their own.”

“We’ve been lucky so far because Gorbachev has managed to keep the negotiations going,” a State Department official added. “If the talks fall apart, we may have to choose between Gorbachev and the republics--and at this point, we don’t really have an answer.”

Bush is scheduled to meet with Yeltsin for an hour next Tuesday, after spending four hours with Gorbachev, the White House said Thursday.

During his visit next Thursday to the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, Bush will be the guest of Leonid Kravchuk, the fiery Communist chairman of the republic’s Parliament, who has made independence from Moscow his main claim to popular support.

Bush will see other republic leaders, probably including Armenian President Levon Ter-Petrosyan, at a dinner at the U.S. ambassador’s residence on Wednesday, officials said.

But the President may not see the leaders of the three rebellious Baltic republics, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, officials said, even though the United States officially favors their independence from the Soviet Union.

A State Department official said that the Administration quietly told the Baltic leaders that it would prefer that they not seek one-on-one meetings with Bush during the summit--apparently to avoid roiling the atmosphere with Gorbachev.

One U.S. diplomat appealed personally to Lithuania’s separatist president, Vytautas Landsbergis, “that he shouldn’t show up at the embassy gate,” the official said.

A White House spokesman, asked about the Baltic leaders, said only that they had not sought a meeting with Bush.

REDRAWING THE LINES: The Soviets’ new Union Treaty is a Gorbachev triumph. A5