Bush, Yeltsin Plan to Sign ‘Charter of Principles’ : Diplomacy: Non-binding pact is designed to guide the two powers in a new partnership for the 21st Century.

Seeking to wrap their summit meeting next week in the mantle of history, President Bush and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin plan to sign a broadly worded “charter of principles” designed to guide the new U.S.-Russian partnership into the 21st Century, American and Russian officials said Wednesday.

Russian diplomats in Washington and Moscow have been enthusiastically hinting to reporters that the charter will be the dramatic centerpiece of the summit, while doggedly refusing to reveal its contents in detail, presumably to keep up the suspense.

American officials, on the other hand, look vaguely embarrassed when the subject comes up, and a few even admit to a bit of queasiness about the charter, which one described as the post-Cold War equivalent of the grandiose “friendship treaties” that the old Soviet Union used to push on friends and almost-friends.

“The Russians wanted” the charter, a senior Bush Administration official explained with a shrug. “It’s just the way they like to do business.”

The two nations may now be firm friends, in other words, but their political cultures remain worlds apart. Russians are given to effusive declarations of high principle in their diplomacy just as in private life, it seems. American diplomats, bred in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, prefer pragmatic, piecemeal, concrete agreements.

According to officials who have read drafts of the charter, the document sets out a list of broad principles and lofty aspirations for the two countries but commits them to few new concrete steps. It does provide a formal basis for the new, post-Cold War relationship between the United States and Russia, however, something that Yeltsin reportedly had sought.

In the three-part, nine-page document, Russia and the United States “formally declare the end of ideologically motivated confrontation,” vow not to view each other as “potential enemies” and pledge to build a relationship of “cooperation and partnership,” according to reports in the Russian press.

Washington will declare support for Yeltsin’s efforts to create a democratic society; Russia, responding to a U.S. concern, will salute the “key role of the private sector” in reviving its economy.

“The Russian government acts on the assumption that a favorable climate for Western investment must be created,” the draft reportedly says, “. . . while the U.S. government will seek to liberalize and eventually repeal all restrictions, including multilateral ones, on high-technology transfers.”

The charter also recognizes existing borders and says they can be changed only through peaceful means, language meant to reassure both Bush and Russia’s neighbors that the Kremlin will not use force to grab contested areas of Ukraine, Moldova or other former Soviet republics.

All of those provisions appear merely to codify existing U.S. and Russian policies, however. On technology, for example, the U.S.-led Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, which regulated Western commercial dealings with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, invited Russia to become a member as recently as last week.

Sources in Moscow said that the Russians initially wanted a formal treaty of friendship with their former Cold War adversary but U.S. officials ruled that out--largely because a treaty requires ratification by the Senate, and the White House had no desire to take on the political burden of achieving such a vote.

So the two governments settled on the “charter,” a statement of shared political intent that carries no legally binding clauses.

That was little solace for some U.S. officials.

“It’s still a friendship treaty,” a senior State Department official said with a groan. “I don’t know how we get into these positions.”

But others said that Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III quickly decided that the potential political benefit to Yeltsin far outweighs any drawbacks. They have made support for Yeltsin a basic goal of U.S. policy, arguing that no other Russian leader is likely to succeed at political and economic reform.

It was unclear how the pact will play in Moscow. Even before its announcement, doubters were pointing out how utterly old-fashioned and Soviet-style was Yeltsin’s desire to have the document.

“The customary Soviet political culture traded words for deeds, and words then created the appearance of deeds,” said Alexander B. Pumpyansky, editor in chief of the New Times weekly. “Each meeting under the Soviets had to end with a joint communique or some statement of principles. . . . But there is also a real process going on of our transition from being rivals to the conditions of a partnership.”

Bush and Yeltsin still have some unfinished business from the Cold War to conclude at their summit: a proposed deal to cut the two countries’ long-range nuclear arsenals by about 50% from the limits imposed by last year’s Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

Yeltsin publicly refused Wednesday to give in to a U.S. demand for elimination of all land-based missiles with multiple warheads, the powerful weapons that are the backbone of Moscow’s nuclear force but less important to the United States.

At a meeting with military officers in Moscow, Yeltsin charged that the Administration’s proposal is one-sided and would give the United States a strategic advantage, Russia’s Itar-Tass news agency reported.

Yeltsin told the officers that he will hold firm on the idea of strategic parity with the United States, the agency said.

Russia has offered to destroy some of its multiple-warhead missiles, but still wants to keep up to 30% of its nuclear force in that form, U.S. officials said.

Yeltsin said that the unresolved issues would have to be negotiated during the Washington summit, Itar-Tass reported. At the same time, Moscow’s Interfax news agency quoted Yeltsin as saying he had sent Bush a letter, but it did not disclose the contents.

McManus reported from Washington and Dahlburg reported from Moscow.