U.S. Moves to Bolster Moscow Ties : Diplomacy: Christopher visits Russian counterpart on way home from Asia. He pushes for cooperation on global problems.

Secretary of State Warren Christopher met with Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev on Monday to smooth over recent strains in the ties between the two countries, urging closer cooperation on problems such as Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Middle East.

Afterward, in a quip that reflected the touchiness of the relationship between Washington and Moscow, Kozyrev told the secretary of state, “We’ve worked out a way to communicate more clearly than (through) CNN,” U.S. officials said.

For his part, Christopher told the Russian foreign minister of his time as chairman of the Los Angeles law firm O’Melveny & Myers, when he kept a card on his desk saying, “Most of the partners, most of the time, care more about being consulted than how it comes out.”

Christopher stopped for more than three hours in Russia’s far eastern port city as he was flying home from an 11-day tour of Asia. He had first invited Kozyrev to Washington, but the Russian foreign minister asked to meet in Russia instead.

“Russia’s plainly wanting to assert its significance as a power,” observed one senior Administration official after Christopher’s meeting with the foreign minister.

The senior official said Christopher did not want to challenge Russia’s new assertiveness but was eager to maintain a good relationship with Kozyrev “so we can get out on the table, and be candid about, the differences we see.”

Late last week, Kozyrev complained that the United States was taking Russia for granted. “Relations between a superpower and a regional power or between a senior partner and a junior partner are not acceptable to us,” he said.

State Department officials, meanwhile, were surprised and irked by Kozyrev’s recent trip to the Middle East. While in Tunis, Tunisia, Kozyrev announced that Yasser Arafat, the Palestine Liberation Organization chairman, was willing to return to the peace talks.

That announcement attracted considerable publicity and underscored Russia’s renewed interest in playing a greater role in the Middle East. But American officials felt it was misleading, because Kozyrev neglected to address the critical issue of exactly when and how the PLO would return to the talks.

“The relationship (between the United States and Russia) can’t afford to have people spring surprises on each other,” one Christopher aide said.

A senior Administration official told reporters that during the Vladivostok meeting, Christopher briefed Kozyrev on the “fairly complex time sequence” involved in resuming Middle East peace talks.

“I think we’re on the same wavelength now,” the senior U.S. official said, strongly implying that this was not the case while Kozyrev was meeting with the PLO. “We’ll work in close harmony to try to get the parties back to the table. It’s a situation in which we (the United States and Russia) might have benefited from some earlier consultations.”

Christopher also warned that the Clinton Administration policy of seeking a strategic partnership with Russia is now increasingly being challenged in the U.S. Congress. While testifying on Capitol Hill last month, Christopher was repeatedly asked about the rise of more conservative forces in Russia and about Moscow’s more assertive, nationalistic foreign policy. Clinton too has recently said he is “concerned” about the direction of political changes in Russia.

The Vladivostok session was clearly aimed at overcoming these recent difficulties.

Seeking to minimize the impact of Kozyrev’s complaint that Russia is receiving “junior partner” treatment, Christopher, 68, told a news conference, “I’m senior in terms of chronology, but we’re full and equal partners in every other respect.”

The most persistent of the problems between the United States and Russia involves Bosnia, where Russia recently launched an important new diplomatic initiative by sending peacekeeping troops to Sarajevo without consulting in advance with the United States and its allies.

Christopher knows he needs to enlist Russia’s help to persuade the Bosnian Serbs to give up territory. “Both of us feel an urgent need to bring that conflict to an end,” he said of Bosnia.