Peres Urges Russia to Boost Mideast Peace : Diplomacy: Israel’s foreign minister uses his Moscow visit to warn against more arms sales to countries in the region.

Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said Friday that Russia has the clout to nudge forward stalled Middle East peace talks, but he warned that its continued arms sales to the volatile region threaten all nations there.

“To save the Middle East, we must demilitarize it,” said Peres, an Israeli statesman for 45 years. “Russia has experience in Arab diplomacy and can contribute more than ever before to bringing about peace.”

Courting Moscow a few weeks after the Israeli government won Washington’s goodwill by pledging to slow construction of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, Peres emphasized that Russia remains a “superpower” with regional influence.

“We look upon present-day Russia as a contributing Russia,” he said. “Russia, instead of being a supplier of arms, will hopefully become a supplier of peace.”

The end of the Cold War presents “a God-sent contribution” to helping bring peace to the Middle East, Peres added, speaking at a news conference after three days of talks with top Russian officials, including acting Prime Minister Yegor T. Gaidar and Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev.

Despite his upbeat tone and emphasis on cooperation, Peres rebuked Russia’s post-Communist government for selling arms and military supplies to prop up the country’s collapsing economy.

For decades, the Soviet Union supplied weapons to Arab nations such as Syria as a means of countering U.S. aid to Israel.

“During my meetings here, I expressed our concern at the continuation of arms supplies to some Middle Eastern countries and our hope that there will be a reduction soon,” Peres said. “I hope we were listened to, carefully.”

Aside from this sticking point, Peres described his visit as a successful first step toward developing political and economic cooperation between Russia and Israel’s new Labor Party government. The countries re-established full diplomatic relations last October, nearly 25 years after Moscow severed ties during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

Pledging to explore joint projects in agriculture, aviation and conversion of defense plants into civilian industries, Peres and Russian Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi announced in a joint communique that they hope to swiftly “transform mutual goodwill into concrete results.”

For example, Peres suggested, Russian desalination technology could ease the water shortage in the Mideast by allowing Israel to make potable water from the sea.

During his trip, the first official visit by an Israeli foreign minister to Moscow, Peres laid a wreath on the graves of the three young men who were killed as they defended President Boris N. Yeltsin’s government headquarters from hard-line Communists during last August’s failed putsch. One of the victims was a Jew.

The 69-year-old foreign minister praised Moscow’s policy of allowing Jews to emigrate--and he promised to use the money secured by $10 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to create more jobs for Russian immigrants to Israel.

“For 74 years, the Jewish people in the Soviet Union did not have the entitled right to be Jewish, to study the Hebrew language, to pray or to keep in touch with their brothers and sisters around the world,” he said. “We are really and sincerely grateful for the change.”