New Plans Expected for A-Weapons Cuts : Arms control: A Russian official says speeches this week by Bush and Yeltsin are likely to announce the initiatives.

President Bush and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin are both planning to announce new arms control initiatives this week to continue their rapid reduction of nuclear weaponry, Russia’s foreign minister said Monday.

“We are waiting for major foreign policy speeches by President Bush, in the State of the Union address, and I am sure that President Yeltsin will also (speak) in the days to come in New York and other places,” Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev told reporters after a meeting with Secretary of State James A. Baker III.

“We will find out new initiatives” in those speeches, he said.

Yeltsin is planning to travel to New York at the end of the week for a summit meeting of leaders of U.N. Security Council member nations.

Kozyrev and Baker refused to provide any specifics on the proposed initiatives, but other officials suggested that they might include further deep cuts in long-range nuclear missiles and a timetable for the destruction of short-range, or tactical, nuclear weapons.

Kozyrev said that he and Baker discussed “preparations” for the new initiatives in their two-hour meeting here Monday evening.

Baker, who stood next to Kozyrev as he spoke, smiled but said nothing.

Officials in Washington said last week that Bush is considering announcing the removal of multiple warheads from at least some U.S. land-based missiles and will urge the former Soviets to do the same. More than twice as many Soviet warheads would be affected by such a plan, 2,500 compared to 1,000 for the United States, so Bush may propose that the United States would reduce the number of warheads on its submarine-based missile force to help make up the difference.

Such an initiative would cut U.S. warhead totals from the ceiling of 6,000 called for under the strategic arms reduction treaty (START) to at least 5,000 and perhaps even fewer. The former Soviet Union has already said it would reduce unilaterally to 5,000 warheads, however, so Bush is under pressure to offer cuts that will take U.S. levels below those already promised by Moscow.

For his part, Yeltsin said Saturday that he plans to change the targeting of Russia’s nuclear missiles so that they are no longer aimed at American cities.

Administration officials in Washington said Bush and the Russian leader had exchanged correspondence outlining their proposals, Bush in a letter to Yeltsin on Thursday and the Russian leader in a response that arrived at the White House on Monday morning.

The officials declined to discuss details, but one Administration source said Yeltsin’s letter reiterated his commitment Saturday to change targeting plans for Russian nuclear missiles.

The officials said they expect Yeltsin to unveil his initiatives in an address Wednesday, responding to the proposals Bush is expected to make in his speech tonight.

Earlier, a senior State Department official told reporters that Russia and its neighbors have been disabling their short-range nuclear weapons more quickly than the United States had expected.

The Bush Administration is so pleased by the results that it has quietly stopped pressing the republics of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus to move all their nuclear weapons into Russia, the official said.

“We have . . . some very good news in terms of movement, storage and disabling” of tactical nuclear weapons, the official said. “If anything, they’re making more rapid progress than might have been surmised.”

The official refused to provide any details of how many of the former Soviet Union’s short-range nuclear weapons, estimated at more than 15,000, had been disabled so far. But he said all four of the republics that are holding nuclear weapons--Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus--have made progress toward dismantling their arsenals, and have given U.S. officials “rapid” timetables for completing the job.

He added that the United States will not press the three non-Russian republics to move all their weapons into Russia as long as they are dismantling them within their own borders.

“We don’t have a desire in terms of (moving the weapons into Russia). We have a desire to have them all destroyed,” the official said.

Previously, the Administration had publicly pressed the other republics to move the weapons into Russia, but that idea proved unpopular in Ukraine, which has been feuding with its larger neighbor over the ownership of navy units and other military assets.

“We are still hearing from all three of those republics that . . . they want to be non-nuclear zones,” the official added. “And in the case of Ukraine and Belarus, I think that there is movement clearly in that direction.”

Kazakhstan is also working to disable tactical nuclear weapons but may have decided to retain Soviet long-range missile bases on its territory, he indicated.

He suggested that the United States would accept that outcome as long as the missiles are under the control of the central military authorities of the Commonwealth of Independent States, the loose confederation that succeeded the Soviet Union.

“It’s not up to us to determine how they’re going to sort out these differences, so long as . . . there isn’t a proliferation of nuclear powers,” the official said.

He suggested that Kazakhstan could accede to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear state as long as the missiles are “controlled by the central authority” of the commonwealth.

Times staff writers Douglas Jehl and Robert Toth, in Washington, contributed to this report.