Yeltsin Assured U.S. Will Push for Aid Package

Boris N. Yeltsin arrived Monday for the first full-scale U.S.-Russian summit meeting since the collapse of the Soviet Union and immediately collected what he wanted most: a strong assurance that $24 billion in multinational aid will come his way despite delays in his economic reforms.

“Russia and America are becoming friends,” Yeltsin said, standing in withering June heat on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base after descending from his official jet. “Every day we feel growing support for our reforms from both the leaders of the United States and ordinary Americans.”

President Bush, in a television interview, praised the Russian president as “a courageous man who’s facing enormously difficult problems” and said: “He’s coming as a friend, not as an adversary.

“I will pledge to work with him in every way we can to help his economy and to keep moving forward in terms of world peace,” Bush said.

In the same vein, Secretary of State James A. Baker III said that the United States will press for a massive international aid package to begin flowing to Russia--despite complaints from some officials--and Russians--that Yeltsin has slowed the pace of his capitalist-style economic reforms.

The Administration’s pledges on aid were the first announcements in a three-day meeting that is also expected to include a new agreement to cut nuclear weapons, new pacts on cooperation in outer space and a broadly worded “charter of principles” to guide U.S.-Russian relations into the 21st Century.

But Russian officials said that the assurances on aid are especially welcome, because they ensure that Yeltsin will not return home to his own restive voters looking “empty-handed.”

Reflecting his own political sensitivities, Yeltsin did not mention his country’s desperate need for aid--until a reporter asked, and then he gave a prickly, dignified answer.

“Russia is a great and proud country,” he said stiffly. “We have not come for handouts.”

The $24-billion aid package proposed by the Bush Administration and other Western governments would be administered largely by the International Monetary Fund. Fund officials have warned that Yeltsin’s reform program appears to fall short of their requirements--but Baker said the Administration favors going ahead anyway.

“We think it’s important that they make sure they comply with the major elements of the IMF program,” Baker told reporters at the White House. “But if you say you’ve got to hold them to the crossing of each and every t and the dotting of each and every i , that isn’t the way it works.”

Baker said that he believes Yeltsin is fully committed to comprehensive economic and political reform and said the Russian’s program “represents extraordinary political courage.”

In recent weeks, several decisions by Yeltsin raised doubts in the West over how far his reforms would go. The Russian president appointed three conservative Communist industrialists to his Cabinet and postponed lifting energy price controls, a measure the IMF had specifically sought.

But Monday morning, before leaving Moscow, he sent the West--and the Russian people--a series of clear signals that he intends to press ahead with economic change.

He promoted First Deputy Prime Minister Yegor T. Gaidar, the chief of his radical economic reform team, to the job of “acting prime minister” and signed a decree requiring thousands of state-run enterprises to pay their rapidly mounting debts or risk being sold to private investors. And he moved to ensure private enterprises more independence by allowing them to buy the land on which their buildings stand.

Both Bush and Yeltsin said they hope to reach an agreement for further cuts in long-range nuclear weapons during the Russian leader’s stay. And Bush gave a hint that he may be willing to compromise on the issue--for the sake of Yeltsin’s political comfort at home.

“It’s important that I bear in mind that President Yeltsin has some difficulties from his right, from the old militarists, and from others who may not be as committed to democracy as he is. . . ,” Bush said in an interview broadcast on Cable News Network. “I have to be sensitive, as do our arms control people, to the pressures that Boris Yeltsin is under.”

Bush and Yeltsin already have agreed in principle to cut their nations’ atomic warheads by roughly half from the limits negotiated in last year’s Strategic Arms Reduction Talks treaty--from about 9,000 warheads to about 4,700.

But they have not yet agreed on three issues: the precise ceilings, the timing of the cuts and--most important--how many powerful multiple-warhead missiles each side can keep. The United States has been demanding that Russia eliminate its giant land-based multiple-warhead missiles, the heart of Moscow’s nuclear force; Russia, in turn, has been demanding cuts in the U.S. Navy’s submarine-based multiple-warhead missiles.

“We have four or five problems, at least two of which, I think, are extraordinarily difficult,” Baker said. The secretary of state met with Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev at the State Department in the evening to try to hammer out a deal.

Arms control experts inside and outside the government said a compromise appears within reach but that it might take final bargaining between Bush and Yeltsin to seal it. One official described the possible compromise as a total warhead ceiling of about 4,000, with significant reductions in both Russian and U.S. multiple-warhead missiles.

They said the pact will come in the form of a “framework agreement” that would probably leave many of the details to be negotiated later by experts.

“In the past few days, I have heard the term ‘framework agreement’ many times,” said Yeltsin’s spokesman, Vyacheslav V. Kostikov. “It’s become Boris Nicolayevich’s favorite expression. He knows how to say it in English.”

Baker said that the United States has deliberately refrained from using the economic aid issue to put pressure on the Russians in arms control talks.

“None of (the aid) is conditioned and there’s been no linkage between the two,” he said.

That was in keeping with what both sides called the central goal of the summit: cementing peaceful, long-term relations between the world’s two largest nuclear powers.

“Over the course of two centuries, the foreign affairs of America and Russia have at times converged and at other times conflicted,” Baker told Yeltsin at the air base. “But in the 200 years of our relations, it has not been possible until this year for America and Russia to forge a truly genuine partnership . . . the kind of partnership that is only possible between the elected representatives of democratic governments.”

“We used to be separated by . . . a psychological gap,” Yeltsin replied. “Today I can say . . . that the gap between us has closed.”

The end of the Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union also has robbed such meetings as this of much of their drama. From the White House to the Capitol, Pennsylvania Avenue was decked--for the first time in history--in the horizontal white-, red- and blue-striped flag of a democratic Russia. But unlike the days when the Soviet Union’s red flag flew, there were no crowds straining for a glimpse of the visiting leader.