Russia Threatens Use of Military in Ethnic Conflicts : Warfare: Moscow says it is prepared to intervene to protect Russians in strife-torn Moldova and Georgia. But both nations insist they will not be intimidated.

In saber-rattling warnings to its neighbors, Russia declared Sunday that it would use its military might to protect the lives of Russians living throughout the troubled nations of the former Soviet Union.

President Boris N. Yeltsin, his face stony with anger and determination, told Moldova on his return from the United States and Canada that while Moscow wants a negotiated settlement of the growing ethnic conflict there, it is prepared to intervene militarily to protect Moldova’s Russian population.

“We want to settle all matters at the negotiating table . . . but when dozens of people are killed and when there is a war going on, we cannot remain idle, especially when it is happening on our borders,” Yeltsin said.

“In this case, we must react to defend people and to stop the bloodshed. We have the strength to do that.”

Similar warnings were directed at Georgia, another former Soviet republic, whose forces are trying to restore Georgian rule in the breakaway region of South Ossetia.

The tough talk, coming not only from Yeltsin but also from Gen. Alexander V. Rutskoi, his vice president, and in a series of Cabinet statements over the weekend, made it clear that Russia is ready to use its considerable military capability in these spreading ethnic conflicts.

The initial responses from both Moldova and Georgia were that they would not be intimidated by Russia. They rejected the Russian warnings as interference in domestic Moldovan and Georgian affairs, and they dismissed Yeltsin as a bully.

Moldovan President Mircea Snegur accused Yeltsin of “imperialist aspirations” and charged Russia with supporting “authoritarian, neo-Communist regimes” solely on the basis of their professed loyalty to Moscow.

Yeltsin, on landing in Moscow on Sunday, said Russia has the military strength to impose its will in Moldova and added, “Let Snegur know that.”

In Georgia, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister who now heads the country’s governing council, supported the Moldovan statement, which accused Moscow of refusing other nations “the right to build their lives as they wish.”

Shevardnadze said in an open letter to the Russian government that Rutskoi’s statements have “sharply worsened the situation in Georgia” and could incite further bloodshed there.

Russia and Yeltsin himself face a clear test of authority, and the sheer emotion involved in the predicament of Russians caught outside their homeland in the midst of rising ethnic tensions makes the issue particularly volatile.

In Moldova’s breakaway Dniester region, Russian and Ukrainian insurgents are battling the country’s Moldovan majority in an armed insurrection out of fear that the country will reunite with neighboring Romania, while in the Georgian province of South Ossetia, secessionists are seeking to break away and join their kinsmen in neighboring Russia’s North Ossetia.

The toll from three days of fighting in Moldova totaled 200 dead and 300 wounded, many of them civilians, according to reporters for the Moscow-based Ostankino television network. A Moldovan government spokesman said loyalist forces captured the key town of Bendery on Saturday but lost it to a counterattack Sunday.

“Bendery is now controlled by separatist forces,” the spokesman said by telephone from Kishinev, the Moldovan capital. “The Russian army intervened and pushed us out. The fighting has died down, and there is a relative calm. Casualties are great, but up to now nobody knows exactly how many were killed.”

The Sunday evening newscast in Moscow showed bombed-out buildings in Bendery with dozens of bodies scattered in the city’s streets.

Several fundamental issues are at stake in this and other regional conflicts, and their resolution--or lack of it--will probably shape not only Russia’s relations with its closest neighbors but influence the whole character of post-Soviet Europe.

Russia’s security no longer depends on the balance of power with the United States, Germany or other Western states but on relations with its closest neighbors, almost all former Soviet republics determined to establish their political independence from Moscow but clearly still within its sphere of influence on many questions.

With more than 40 million Russians outside the country’s borders in other republics of the former Soviet Union, the Yeltsin government feels that, for political reasons, it must come to their defense. To fail to do so would put into question its own political legitimacy as a nationalist regime, and its critics are waiting to tear it apart on this and other issues.

The potential for broad upheaval within the former Soviet Union is no less than that in Yugoslavia--and the territory is much greater. About a dozen ethnic conflicts are at various stages of development, and several threaten the internal coherence of Russia itself.

Russia thus feels itself put to the test by these conflicts, notably by the increasing attacks on Russian--former Soviet--forces still stationed outside its borders. Nothing less than its dominance over the nations that emerged from the old Soviet Union is at stake.

And, finally, there is the question of Russian national pride, so injured by the Soviet collapse and only now recovering under Yeltsin’s leadership. Each attack on a Russian stronghold seems to evoke the strongest possible response.

“If one more shell falls on the territory of a military unit or on civilian headquarters, the side that launched it will get 10 times as much in return,” Rutskoi told a political rally here Sunday. “Everyone must keep in mind that Russia will not tolerate such treatment of Russian-speaking people any longer.”

Speaking earlier in a television broadcast, Rutskoi accused local politicians in Moldova, Ossetia and other regions of “genocide” against the Russian minorities--an emotional charge that serves as a nationalist call to colors.

“Russia will not permit the Dniester and South Ossetian conflicts to be resolved by force,” Rutskoi declared. “We call upon the peoples of the world and on the political leaders . . . to condemn and to bring to justice those politicians who have gone too far and who have unleashed genocide against their own people.”

Yet if Yeltsin formally ordered troops to quell the fighting in Moldova or Ossetia, as seemed possible from his comments Sunday, it would be Russia’s first official use of force on the territory of another member of the Commonwealth of Independent States. As such, it could set a precedent for Russia to intervene whenever the lives of ethnic Russians are endangered.

Moscow’s warnings came after a regiment of the former Soviet 14th Army, now part of the Russian armed forces still stationed in Moldova, was attacked Saturday and again Sunday, according to the Russian news agency Itar-Tass.

The 14th Army’s headquarters in Tiraspol demanded an immediate halt to the attacks and warned it was prepared to use force not only to defend itself and the Russian community there but also to restore order throughout the region. Until now, the army command has taken pains to maintain its neutrality.

“Involvement of the 14th Army in this conflict will be considered as the beginning of Russia’s war against Moldova,” Snegur responded in a telegram to the army headquarters.

Radio Russia said Sunday evening that thousands of Russian-speakers had gathered outside the former Soviet army base in Tiraspol, demanding weapons to defend the district from Moldovan attack.

The commanding general said that despite the army’s pledge of neutrality, the garrison “is unlikely to be able to restrain those assembled from seizing arms and equipment,” the radio reported.

Ethnic Russians and Ukrainians in Moldova have declared an independent republic of 600,000 people along the Dniester River in the eastern part of Moldova, which has a total population of 4.3 million that is ethnically largely Romanian.