Clinton Quietly Lobbies Congress on Russia Aid : Funding: U.S. officials detail effort to boost Yeltsin and reforms.

Days before Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s survival of an impeachment vote, the White House launched a campaign to persuade a budget-conscious U.S. Congress to come through with new funding and aid approaches to boost reform efforts in Russia, two top officials of the Clinton Administration said Sunday.

The White House will seek at least an additional $300 million in bilateral aid on top of the $400 million that Congress approved last year to facilitate the transition to democracy and a free-market economy, Secretary of State Warren Christopher said in a television interview.

The United States also is assembling a “very interesting and . . . exciting package of ideas” that are tangible and “down to earth and non-ideological” to get to grass-roots Russians, he said on the CBS program “Face the Nation.”

While hinting that the amount of U.S. aid might go higher, he offered no specifics on either limits on value or the kinds of aid to be discussed at President Clinton’s scheduled summit meeting with Yeltsin this weekend in Vancouver, Canada. Additional multilateral aid proposals, dealing with such areas as debt relief and currency stabilization, also are being discussed among the world’s seven major industrialized democracies in advance of their July summit in Japan, Christopher added.

Over the past week, Clinton has quietly been lobbying Congress to win backing for the aid, Vice President Al Gore said Sunday.

“What we’re finding is that there is a great deal of support for the proposition that, in concert with our allies, we ought to do what we can to help stabilize the movement toward democracy in Russia,” he said on ABC’s “This Week with David Brinkley.”

Christopher said that he also had briefed more than 40 senators and more than 100 House members over the past week on the U.S. role in the Russian political crisis.

The White House strategy emphasizes that appropriating additional funds will protect U.S. interests and will cost far less than the expense of dealing with the ramifications of a failure of Russia’s democratic experiment. “The reason we’re going to do that (appropriate more) is not out of charity but out of the interests of the people of the United States,” Christopher said.

“You know, if Yeltsin is overturned and if this situation is reversed, the stakes are just enormous,” he continued. “We have the possibility of a revival of a nuclear threat, we have the possibility of increased defense budgets, the lack of market opportunities, and we just have a new threat to the United States as a whole.”

In appearances that appeared to be well-coordinated, Christopher, Gore, Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) and House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) all used similar language on talk shows Sunday to describe the threat of failure in Russia, the U.S. role and aid goals.

In what may have foreshadowed the innovative approach that Christopher promised, Bradley suggested on CNN’s “Newsmaker Sunday” an array of new programs ranging from replacing Chernobyl-style nuclear reactors to providing medicine and infant formulas to pushing student and business exchanges.

All the officials also used identical language in reaffirming U.S. support for Yeltsin. “We’re committing ourselves to the values and principles for which Boris Yeltsin is fighting in Russia. He has been speaking very eloquently and fighting very skillfully on behalf of democracy,” Gore said.

The Administration now believes its unwavering support of Yeltsin since the crisis erupted March 21 has played a significant role in his survival thus far.

“There’s a great deal of evidence that the decisiveness shown by President Clinton has had a measurable impact on events,” Gore added.

Former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev said Sunday that the best way to defuse the current constitutional crisis would be to hold early elections for both the presidency and the Congress of People’s Deputies.

“I think that no referendum could . . . substitute for the elections that we need so much, and we shouldn’t waste our time involving our whole society in an unnecessary debate about the referendum,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Russian congressional elections are not due until March, 1995, with presidential elections set for June, 1996.

Gorbachev also discounted warnings about civil war, made particularly by his own former foreign minister, Georgian leader Eduard A. Shevardnadze.

“I think there are enough forces of common sense in Russia . . . that will not permit that to happen. The most important factor is that our entire society rejects confrontation,” he said.

“Our society will support those politicians who will continue reforms . . . and our society will reject those who will try to impose methods of diktat or something of that kind to our society.’

Meanwhile, Christopher said that the United States began a campaign over the weekend to persuade the Serbs to sign the international peace plan for Bosnia-Herzegovina, which involves dividing the war-torn republic into ethnic provinces. Washington is going to tighten and toughen economic sanctions against the Serbs, press ahead with a war-crimes tribunal and continue humanitarian aid in the region, Christopher said. He also predicted that the United Nations is likely to adopt measures within the next week to enforce a “no-fly zone” over Bosnia.

He said that “if the Serbs don’t soon sign, we’ll be counseling with our allies . . . on the the possibility of lifting the arms embargo” that keeps Bosnia from buying weapons for its defense.