NEWS ANALYSIS : Russia’s <i> Nyet</i> to NATO Signals Rising Distrust

The West was stunned last week to see a cornered Russia strike back with unexpected ferocity against plans to expand NATO eastward, moving a still-frightening Cold War enemy 500 miles closer to Russia’s borders.

To anyone who has read a Russian newspaper recently, it should have come as no surprise.

In the three years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has rediscovered that it has national interests that do not coincide with those of the West.

For months, opinion-makers from across the Russian political spectrum have been warning the United States to stop ignoring Russia’s geopolitical and economic imperatives--and stop dismissing as nationalist cranks the many respected Russians who disagree with U.S. policies on Bosnia-Herzegovina, Iraq or NATO.

“The West in general is doing everything not to listen to Russia,” said Vyacheslav A. Nikonov, chairman of the Parliament’s International Security and Arms Control subcommittee.

A month before Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev launched a diplomatic sneak attack last week on the NATO proposal in Brussels, Nikonov, together with a delegation of Russian lawmakers, had warned a NATO meeting in Washington that Russia would view any expansion of the alliance as a hostile act--particularly if Moscow was not invited to join.

President Boris N. Yeltsin and his chaotic government may be sending the West dangerously contradictory signals about how friendly Moscow can afford to be without giving the Russian Far Right ammunition to attack Yeltsin as an American lackey.

But the political climate outside the Kremlin is unambiguous: Public and parliamentary distrust and suspicion of the West are growing. Elections loom ahead. Standing up to the West will be good theater and good politics for some time to come.

“Yeltsin Tells NATO Off,” read the approving headline in the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda after the gruff Siberian informed the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, or CSCE, meeting in Budapest, Hungary, on Monday that any NATO expansion would trigger a “cold peace.”

With Yeltsin’s enemies demanding early elections in 1995 and a political fight to the death expected, “the Russian government is afraid of supporting anything being done by the United States or the West,” foreign policy analyst Vitaly Naumkin said.

Underlining Russia’s defiance, Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz arrived in Moscow on Tuesday for talks with Iraq’s old ally. Iraq owes Russia about $7 billion, and Moscow has been lobbying for an end to the U.N. trade embargo against Iraq relatively soon so as to restore one of the Soviet Union’s most lucrative trade relationships. The Western allies have criticized Kozyrev for cozying up to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Russia and the West seem even less likely to see eye to eye on Bosnia.

On Tuesday, Russia blocked a CSCE declaration condemning the Bosnian Serbs, a move that is likely to win support from a Russian public whose cultural and religious sympathies lie with the Serbs and from politicians who accuse the West of unfairly favoring the predominantly Muslim government of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The theme that links these diverse political issues is resentment of the victorious West.

The Cold War is over. The Soviet Union lost. To a degree that Yeltsin cannot afford to admit to his compatriots, Russia too has lost: its diplomatic clout, its military might, its standard of living and its international prestige.

“There is a popular slogan in Russia: There were no winners and losers in the Cold War. This is an illusion,” said Alexander A. Konovalev, a defense analyst at Moscow’s U.S.A. and Canada Institute think tank.

Though NATO is a distant abstraction to most Americans, it still inspires caution, if not fear, in generations of former Soviet citizens trained to view it as the principal military threat to their nation’s survival, Konovalev said.

Moreover, Russians want to be liked by other countries, just as Americans do. Many feel hurt and stung to see their former Warsaw Pact allies begging for admission into the old enemy camp and portraying democratic Russia as a resurgent monster in the making.

Russia spends 15 times less than the United States on defense, has a military less than half the size of the Soviet Red Army and no longer shares a common border with Poland or the Czech Republic, the two countries most insistent on NATO membership as a guarantee against Russian aggression, Nikonov said.

Enlarging NATO will only make Russia feel isolated and slighted, provoke the Russian military to demand the retention of tactical nuclear weapons in defense and bolster ultranationalists such as Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, said Nikonov and his colleagues.

“This move is an enormous help to Zhirinovsky, the Communists and everyone else who said, ‘Don’t trust the West because the West will never take into account Russia’s worries,’ ” Nikonov said.

But after the Russian performance in Budapest and Brussels, the West is worried about whether Yeltsin’s nyet on NATO signals deeper conflict to come.

Western officials insist that they have bent over backward to accommodate Russian sensitivities.

“Kozyrev is coming here today not to attack us but to sign two agreements with us,” a senior Clinton Administration official told reporters last week, hours before Kozyrev snubbed his hosts by refusing to sign. “We briefed him, we briefed his deputies. The President has been in direct touch with Yeltsin repeatedly on this.”

One NATO official insisted privately that Vitaly S. Churkin, the Russian ambassador to Brussels, was even handed a copy of the final NATO communique to vet before the allies themselves had seen it. Meanwhile, U.S. officials were assuring the balking Europeans that the Russians would not object.

Indeed, Kozyrev did not object--until the TV cameras started rolling. Then he torpedoed the plan in a move that reminded some seasoned Western diplomats of the hard-line Soviet tactics of the early 1980s.

“Kozyrev has an impressive and proven theatrical streak,” said John Chipman, director of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.

What worries Western officials most is that Kozyrev and Yeltsin may not be acting.

Efron reported from Moscow and Marshall from Brussels.