NEWS ANALYSIS : Yeltsin ‘Victory’ Gives Russia That Old Superpower Feeling : Bosnia: The Kremlin leader’s Sarajevo initiative is a rare foreign policy triumph. It offsets failures in former Soviet republics.

President Boris N. Yeltsin basked Monday in the glow of a rare foreign policy triumph so resounding that Russia felt almost like a superpower again.

By winning Bosnian Serb agreement to withdraw artillery from around Sarajevo and thus avert NATO air strikes, Yeltsin secured “a diplomatic victory for Russia on the scale not only of Europe but of the world,” the president’s spokesman said.

Not bad for a man out sick with a cold. Yeltsin returned to work after a nearly two-week absence on Monday, in time for the accolades.

“Without a single shot, without threatening anyone, without putting its soldiers’ lives in danger, without spending a single ruble, Russia has effectively won an important battle for its world status,” said his spokesman, Vyacheslav V. Kostikov.

The Russian success with the Serbs may or may not hold, depending as it does on the volatile situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina. And Russian officials acknowledge that without the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s tough position on air strikes, the Serbs would not have withdrawn.

But Yeltsin’s Sarajevo initiative nonetheless served a double purpose, Russian commentators said. It won him desperately needed points at home by playing to Russians’ sympathies for the Serbs, their fellow Orthodox Christian Slavs. And it gave Moscow a chance to clarify at least some of what is often a very murky foreign policy, placing the Serbs definitely inside Russia’s newly forming sphere of influence.

“If it holds, this is the first broad-scale success for Russian foreign policy, in which Russia acted as an independent force with clearly defined, conscious national interests,” said Anatoly Rassadin, an analyst at the Institute for National Security and Strategic Studies in Moscow.

“Russia didn’t fall in line with the West. It didn’t try to act on abstractions like democratic values or human rights. It just clearly defined its national interests and brought them into practice,” Rassadin said.

This kind of success is especially welcome now, because Moscow has largely failed in its attempts to define and apply its foreign policy in what Russians call “the near abroad”--the other former republics of the Soviet Union.

Repeated attempts to quell the fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia and Tajikistan have gone nowhere. Moscow has managed to secure few guarantees for the 25 million Russians living in other former republics, the largest diaspora in the world.

It has remained deeply isolationist in the broader arena, still smarting from the cost--in money and, in places such as Afghanistan, in lives--of the extensive Soviet sphere of influence.

In the former Yugoslav federation, Russia has remained largely passive over the last two years, but when the NATO threat to bomb Bosnian Serb positions around Sarajevo grew imminent, Moscow apparently decided that it must be a partner in any international actions in Eastern Europe.

Vitaly S. Churkin, Russia’s special envoy in the former Yugoslav republics, expressed Moscow’s sense of hurt pride at having been too often pushed to the sidelines. He told Russian television that “the West should learn a lesson” from events in Bosnia. “And the lesson is that Russia should be treated as an equal partner, not the way some of them did it this time.”

Yeltsin acted in part under the pressure of political competition. Russia’s historic and religious ties to the Serbs made the Yugoslav conflict a natural grandstanding issue for ultranationalists like Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, whose success in the December parliamentary elections appears to have pushed Yeltsin toward a more nationalist stance. Zhirinovsky declared in Parliament that he would view any NATO bombing of Serb positions around Sarajevo as “a declaration of war on Russia.”

Although never as extreme in his rhetoric, Yeltsin too cautioned that air strikes could escalate the Bosnian conflict, and he told visiting British Prime Minister John Major last week that Russia could not be left out of any resolution of the crisis.

Since then, it seems, Yeltsin has been on the phone several times a day with other world leaders, and in a letter-writing mode as well. Working mainly from his country house, where a cold had laid him up, he appears to have run the most active diplomatic campaign of his presidency. On Monday, he continued his contacts, laying out his vision of the next steps needed in Bosnia to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

Overall, he came out looking very statesmanlike, to the point that Kostikov crowed that “quietly, without haste, without superfluous publicity and noise,” Yeltsin “showed who is the indisputable leader of Russia today.”

According to Sergei A. Filatov, Yeltsin’s chief of staff, the president also showed that “the adoption of major decisions on the security of the world community without Russia does not work.”

As Russia asserted itself, echoes of the old superpower rivalry sounded in its dire warnings of the possibly calamitous results of NATO air strikes--hints that Moscow could be drawn into the conflict and that the Cold War opponents would once again face each other across the battlefield.

Given the domestic pressure to defend the Serbs, Yeltsin had little choice but to sound a relatively hard line.

“If Russia had kept quiet and the bombing had started, it would have led to a colossal internal explosion in Russia politically,” said Alexander Konovalov, a military expert at the U.S.A.-Canada Institute. “Maybe it wouldn’t have gotten to the point of street demonstrations, but maybe it would have.”

Fortunately, the faint threat of a return to Cold War enmity ended ideally. Instead of facing each other down, analysts say, Russia and the West moved toward a new kind of partnership.

“This is a deepening of Russian-American relations,” Rassadin said. “The very fact of resolving a joint problem is a giant step forward--just a giant step forward--because our goals were identical.”

And so far, each side appears to have received what it wanted most.

“The Serbs could keep their face and react to the ultimatum, and the West gets what it wanted with the end of the blockade of Sarajevo,” Rassadin said. “And Russia goes from a passive observer to an active player.”