Suddenness of Yeltsin’s Plan Startles Russia

Even as they hailed President Boris N. Yeltsin’s new disarmament proposals, Russian journalists and scholars said Friday that they hope for special reassurance from today’s meeting with President Bush that their leader has not gone off half-cocked in his first major arms-control initiative.

“The (Russian) proposals on disarmament obviously were prepared in great haste,” the newspaper Izvestia said, citing arms expert Alexander Savelyev.

“They have not been thought through properly,” it said, “and they lack clarity on the crucial point: Will Russia’s economy gain from the coming super-cuts or, on the contrary, collapse under the extra billions it will have to dish out for the purpose?”

Several other aspects of Yeltsin’s proposals for drastic weapons cuts seem at this point to defy common sense, Russian arms control scholars said, adding that they hope his intentions will become clearer after he discusses disarmament, among other topics, with Bush at Camp David.

Why, for example, asked Pavel Bayev of the Institute of Europe, a Moscow think tank, did Yeltsin propose to ultimately do away with submarine patrols when, with their superior ability to survive a nuclear first strike, submarine-launched weapons are considered stabilizing deterrents?

And why, Savelyev asked, did Yeltsin offer to lop four years off the seven years Russia has under existing Soviet-American arms agreements to destroy thousands of its missiles?

Bayev, head of his institute’s political-military research section, commented: “This is very much in the style of Yeltsin: coming out with something that, for experts, may have no substance but leaves the broad public unclear on whether anything really stands behind it or not.”

Unlike the criticism that former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s arms proposals often drew from home-grown conservatives--that he was making too many concessions to the West--doubts about Yeltsin’s plan hinged mainly on the apparent suddenness of his proposal and a certain impression of discombobulation it created.

“The suspicion arises that the text of the speech was prepared by old apparatchiks who have gotten the knack of peaceful initiatives and are more worried about the propaganda side of the business than logic and common sense,” Izvestia said.

“It’s as if his speech was prepared under emergency conditions,” it said, and officials were told, in the old style, “to overtake and leave behind America.”

The former Communist Party daily Pravda commented that Yeltsin’s striking announcement that Russia would no longer target its weapons at the United States was drawing criticism at both home and abroad.

“Where will Moscow point its missiles, then, if it has stopped considering Washington its potential opponent?” it asked.

Even Gorbachev hinted delicately at the rushed appearance of Yeltsin’s proposals, saying he hopes “they are professionally worked through.”

A Moscow arms expert who asked to remain anonymous noted that “things like this should be done as the result of discussion with the legislature and civilian experts,” but “I don’t feel that was done this time.”

Russian Foreign Ministry official Alexei Obukhov, a veteran Soviet arms negotiator, held a news conference Thursday on Yeltsin’s proposals but appeared to be only newly acquainted with them himself, referring frequently to documents lying before him.

Although he could add nothing of substance to what was said by Yeltsin, he and an army general did confirm Izvestia’s doubts: The Russian government has not calculated how much money the arms initiative will cost or save.

Scholars and columnists offered several reasons for Yeltsin’s haste.

First, they said, he timed his move to roughly coincide with President Bush’s arms initiative and to set the stage for his appearance Friday at the United Nations.

“It seems Yeltsin wanted to show that the torch Gorbachev had carried is in reliable hands,” Bayev said, “and that he plays no worse.”

More generally, Bayev said, Yeltsin is being forced to speed up disarmament because of Russia’s need to quickly move missiles out of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus--the other three members of the Commonwealth of Independent States where nuclear weapons of the former Soviet Union are deployed.

The three former Soviet republics can be expected to insist that their weapons not be simply moved to Russia--which plans to take all Soviet strategic nuclear missiles onto its own territory--but destroyed, he added.