Russia Warns U.S. on Rebel Contact : Diplomacy: Moscow says talks with Chechens would be ‘unacceptable’ as official of breakaway republic visits Washington.

Russia summoned U.S. Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering on Friday and warned him that Moscow considers any contact between the United States and leaders of the rebel government of Chechnya to be “unacceptable,” Russian news agencies reported.

However, the breakaway republic’s foreign minister, Shamsettin Yusuf, who is now visiting Washington, said in a telephone interview that he had met with two U.S. State Department officials for more than an hour Friday to explain Chechen President Dzhokar M. Dudayev’s views.

Yusuf said he made it clear that Chechnya would never drop its 3-year-old bid for independence nor accept the status of an autonomous republic inside Russia as a way to end the separatist war that has been raging for nearly seven weeks. Yusuf said the two U.S. officials, whom he declined to name, had explained that President Clinton views the conflict in Chechnya as a Russian internal affair.

“I said, ‘When you declared independence, nobody told you that you are the internal affair of England,’ ” Yusuf said. “It is our right, and our people want it.”

Russian First Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said he told Pickering that Moscow was “perplexed” by the U.S. reception of the “impostor” Yusuf and expected the United States to “put an end to the anti-Russian activities of the Dudayev emissary,” Russian news agencies reported. The Russian Embassy in Washington delivered a similar admonishment.

Moscow also objected to the United States’ issuance of a visa to the 54-year-old Yusuf, who was born in Jordan to a Chechen who had escaped from the Soviet terror of 1932 and was a businessman in Saudi Arabia before joining Dudayev’s government in 1991.

Yusuf said the source of his invitation to the United States is a secret. Pickering told the Reuters news agency that Yusuf had come to the United States as a private individual and in that capacity had met with members of Congress and “a very low-level official at the State Department.”

That official was Steven Coffey, office director in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, State Department spokeswoman Christine Shelly said.

“Mr. Yusuf and his colleagues provided their assessment of the situation in Chechnya and appealed for U.S. support for improved human rights conditions,” she said.

Pickering added: “Yusuf is the alleged foreign minister of Chechnya, and we in no way recognize the state of Chechnya.”

Paul Goble, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, one of several institutions where Yusuf spoke Thursday, argued that Moscow would have been wiser to ignore Chechnya or to even let it secede. Russia has now sown the seeds of its own internal disintegration, said Goble, an expert on nationalities.

“Trying to keep Chechnya inside of Russia will have terrible consequences for Russia,” he said. “I believe, tragically, that these consequences are almost unavoidable now because of the bad behavior of Moscow.”

In a sign that the conflict in Chechnya is spreading to neighboring republics, the village of Verkhny Akum in Ingushetia was bombed Thursday, and sporadic attacks on Russian forces stationed on the border between Chechnya and Dagestan have been reportedly coming from the Dagestani side.

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Meanwhile, Russia’s respected human rights commissioner, Sergei A. Kovalev, said Friday that he has evidence of torture, beatings and extrajudicial killings of suspected Chechen rebels by Russian forces.

Some of the Chechens who were abused are being detained at the Russian headquarters in Mozdok in Ingushetia, he said.

However, Kovalev’s plan to accompany the first international fact-finding mission to Chechnya and investigate the allegations was torpedoed Friday when the Russian military abruptly refused to allow Kovalev to board the diplomats’ airplane.

A five-member delegation from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe had announced at a news conference on Thursday evening that, with Russian permission, Kovalev would be their official guide on a three-day tour to investigate the human rights situation in the war-torn northern Caucasus region.

Kovalev arrived Friday morning at the military airport from which the OSCE delegation was to depart but was barred from setting foot in the airport on personal orders from Defense Minister Pavel S. Grachev.

The action by Grachev, who last week called the anti-war activist Kovalev “a traitor” and “an enemy of Russia,” was a sign of the widening divide between Russia’s government and military.

Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev and Justice Minister Valentin A. Kovalev, who is no relation to the human rights activist, had helped arrange the OSCE trip and knew of Kovalev’s participation.

The commission left for the Russian base in Mozdok without him.

Democratic lawmakers charged that the OSCE delegation had compromised itself by bowing to the Russian army demands.

“Under these circumstances, it will see only what Gen. Grachev permits it to see,” lawmaker Yuri Rybakov said.

The OSCE diplomats planned to spend Friday at the Russian military headquarters in Mozdok, today speaking with refugees in the Ingush capital of Nazran and Sunday in Grozny.

Sergei Kovalev, who has been invited next week to address the European Parliament about Russia’s human rights record in Chechnya, said his exclusion from the fact-finding mission would further damage Russia’s already strained international credibility.

“They’ve decided to create a scandal,” the human rights commissioner told reporters outside the airport gate. “Well, they shall have one.”

In a scathing letter to President Boris N. Yeltsin, Sergei Kovalev charged that Russian generals and hard-line officials have “sabotaged” every attempt at a peaceful settlement of the conflict.

Sergei Kovalev said he has made no secret of his intention to investigate allegations of a detention camp organized by Grachev and Nationalities Minister Nikolai D. Yegorov in Mozdok. He said he will also investigate allegations of “beatings and tortures of detained citizens of Russia, and shootings by squads without any court trials.”

On Friday, Yeltsin relieved Yegorov of his duties as one of the leaders of the operation in Chechnya, citing Yegorov’s bad health. Russian news agencies reported that he was replaced by Nikolai Semyonov, an unknown in Russian politics.

However, Grachev survived a no-confidence vote in the Russian Parliament.

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.

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Mozdok is in North Ossetia, not Ingushetia.

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