Gore Seeks a Warming Trend in Moscow : Russia: Vice president dismisses an earlier warning by Yeltsin of a ‘cold peace.’

After a three-day visit to Moscow aimed at soothing irritated relations between the United States and Russia, Vice President Al Gore said Friday that the threat of a “cold peace” was only rhetorical.

“My impression is that there is no cold peace but instead a warm relationship that is very much on track,” Gore said after a 30-minute meeting with President Boris N. Yeltsin at the hospital where Yeltsin is recovering from minor nose surgery.

At a European summit in Budapest, Hungary, earlier this month, Yeltsin had warned of a “cold peace” in a divided Europe if the North Atlantic Treaty Organization pushed ahead with a proposal to extend membership to the Central and Eastern European countries while excluding Russia.

Earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev had snubbed a meeting of NATO foreign ministers by abruptly refusing to sign a cooperation agreement while television cameras waiting to record the event were rolling.

A senior U.S. Administration official said the United States still does not know whether Moscow will sign the Partnership for Peace agreement but blamed some of the Russian ire on the “misimpression” given to the Russians by the Europeans about whether the former Warsaw Pact nations could join NATO as early as next year.

Gore talked with Yeltsin “in some detail about the misunderstandings they (the Russians) received from the Europeans about what NATO did and didn’t do,” the official said.

In meetings with Russian Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, Gore stressed that the United States wants any expansion to be gradual and to be approved in consultation with the Russians, the official said. Moreover, even if Moscow opts not to sign the Partnership for Peace agreement, Russia’s relationship with NATO will be defined through other international agreements, the officials said.

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While Gore was ironing out relations with Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin, and signing more agreements on U.S.-Russian cooperation on the environment, space, energy and defense conversion, U.S. Defense Secretary William J. Perry, also visiting Moscow, met for 90 minutes with Deputy Defense Minister Andrei A. Kokoshin and Mikhail P. Kolesnikov, head of the Russian military general staff.

Perry told the Associated Press on his airplane that he had tried to calm Moscow’s concern about a NATO expansion and had extensive discussions about how to support the U.N. humanitarian effort in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He said the Russian officials were preoccupied by the situation in the breakaway republic of Chechnya.

To the obvious relief of his hosts, Gore repeated to every Russian official and news reporter that the United States considers the rebellion in Chechnya to be a Russian internal affair, although the United States hopes the conflict can be resolved without more bloodshed.

If the televised images of Russian troops, tanks and helicopters firing on Muslim villagers in Chechnya sent the message that Moscow is still capable of using tanks to protect its national interests--perhaps the wrong message for Poland and the Czech Republic, which insist on NATO membership as a guarantee against Russian aggression--Gore voiced only sympathy with the “immensely complicated” problem.

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As special forces patrolled Moscow to deter possible terrorist attacks from the Chechen community in the capital, Tipper Gore was forced to skip a planned trip to a Russian school because of a bomb threat.

Moscow police said they now handle about a dozen such threats every day. They said the teen-age telephone caller to the school that the vice president’s wife planned to visit was probably just a prankster.

Among the U.S.-Russian agreements signed as a result of the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission on Economic and Technological Development were pledges to cooperate on such joint problems as Arctic pollution, telecommunications, exchanging technical information on nuclear warhead security, recommending revisions to a Russian tax system that stifles Western investment, and the international space station.

The U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corp. has also agreed to issue up to $500 million in loan guarantees to promote private U.S. investment in converting Russian defense plants to peacetime uses.