Yeltsin Is Back on His Schedule, Sort of. . . .

The mystery of Boris N. Yeltsin was partly solved Wednesday--but only partly--as the elusive Russian president turned up right on schedule for a meeting with Secretary of State James A. Baker III but then ducked out of a scheduled press conference.

Yeltsin looked healthy, bright-eyed and self-confident in the morning as he greeted Baker in the Kremlin’s opulent St. Vladimir Hall for talks on arms control and other issues.

It was the Russian president’s first meeting with a foreign visitor since he returned from an unannounced two-day trip outside Moscow that excited feverish speculation both in Russia and abroad.

“I welcome you to the Kremlin,” Yeltsin told Baker, pumping his hand and grinning broadly.

U.S. officials who attended the two-hour meeting said they were impressed by Yeltsin’s command of the details of arms control--”more than when we’ve seen him in the past,” said one.

The officials also said they are convinced that Yeltsin was telling the truth when he said he had left Moscow only to meet with officers of the Black Sea Fleet. Yeltsin went to the Black Sea in secret, one U.S. official said, because he wanted to conceal his talks from the leaders of neighboring Ukraine, which is laying claim to at least a major share of the fleet.

The explanations ended several days of speculation that Yeltsin might have been drinking, depressed or secretly ill.

“We’re pretty sure his heavy drinking days are over,” said one U.S. official. “But he still has a kind of impetuous streak.”

Part of the problem, one official said, may be that Yeltsin has no close advisers with the self-confidence or standing to tell him point-blank when his actions are going to create problems.

In another example of that unpredictability, if a minor one, Yeltsin decided not to join Baker for the joint press conference that has been traditional at recent U.S.-Soviet and U.S.-Russian meetings. Instead, he sent his foreign minister, Andrei V. Kozyrev.

Kozyrev, noticing reporters’ puzzlement, volunteered an explanation but only confused matters further. He said Yeltsin skipped the press conference because his meeting with Baker had run longer than expected. In fact, American officials said, the meeting was about 40 minutes shorter than anticipated; Yeltsin had ended it early.

Kozyrev said Yeltsin was in a hurry because he had to continue preparing for his trip, which takes him to London today, the U.N. Security Council summit in New York on Friday and a summit meeting with President Bush at Camp David, Md., on Saturday.

“To just preempt your question . . . why President Yeltsin is not at my place and why I am replacing him, the simple answer is that the discussion . . . was so substantive and interesting and full of ideas--and this was (a) discussion of preparation for the summit meeting--that it took a little longer than we planned it,” Kozyrev told reporters. “And you know that these are (the) last minutes, really, the last hours before the president leaves Russia in this very, very difficult time of reforms. That’s why he has to be occupied with the other event.”

A U.S. official suggested other reasons: Yeltsin may not have wanted to face questions about his disappearances--especially on a day when he had already given a major arms control speech.