Yeltsin Reaches Accords in India

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin mended fences with longtime Soviet ally India on Thursday by reaching deals on debt repayment and new factories to make spare parts for the Indian military.

Yeltsin called his visit to India, and earlier trips to China and South Korea, efforts to restructure post-Soviet foreign policy and counter hard-line Russian criticism that he is too pro-Western.

Yeltsin and Indian Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao capped the second day of the three-day visit by signing a bilateral friendship pact that replaces a 1971 treaty between the Soviet Union and India.

The Russian president said he and Rao had resolved a key dispute: how much India owes Russia for military and commercial trade in the Soviet era.

Final details remained to be settled, he said, and neither side could provide a dollar figure for the settlement.

For decades, India was the Kremlin’s closest ally outside the Soviet Bloc, buying 80% of its military hardware from the Soviet Union. But the collapse of the Communist government and plunging Russian production left the Indian armed forces short of spare parts.

To solve the problem, the two countries agreed to build factories to manufacture spares, an Indian official said.