Clinton to Join Yeltsin in Moscow for 50th V-E Day : Observances: U.S. President to first attend Washington ceremonies. Britain’s Major is snubbed.

President Clinton, trying to mollify American war veterans and buttress Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, will preside over ceremonies here on May 8 marking the 50th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany, then fly overnight to Moscow to participate in Russia’s V-E Day observances on May 9, the White House said Monday.

After deliberating for weeks on whether to accept Yeltsin’s invitation to Russia’s events as Russian troops are violently suppressing a rebellion in the southern republic of Chechnya, the White House decided over the weekend to go to Moscow after Yeltsin promised that the ceremonies would include a minimum of military pomp.

Clinton’s jet-age scheduling legerdemain claimed one victim--British Prime Minister John Major, who had hoped that Clinton would participate in activities in London on May 8. The snub compounds the offense Major reportedly took over Clinton’s lavish entertainment last week of Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the outlawed Irish Republican Army.

Rather than journey to London, Clinton will mark the anniversary at Arlington National Cemetery with “U.S. veterans, their families and their loved ones,” White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said.

To soften the blow to Britain, the White House announced that Major will have two consolations--an invitation to Washington for a working visit with Clinton on April 3 and 4 and a V-E Day visit from Vice President Al Gore on May 8.

The United States, Britain and France celebrate the end of World War II in Europe on May 8, the Russians on May 9.

Gore also will attend events marking the end of World War II in Europe in Paris and Berlin.

Clinton spoke with Major over the weekend to explain his decision to go to Moscow and to schedule the April visit to symbolize the “very special and warm” relationship between Britain and the United States, McCurry said.

Aides said Clinton concluded that it was critical to stand beside Yeltsin at a time when the Russian leader is feeling increasing hostility from the West as a result of the misadventure in Chechnya, Moscow’s opposition to the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and faltering economic reform efforts at home.

And Yeltsin has let it be known publicly and privately that he and the Russian people would consider it an unforgivable insult should Clinton fail to show.

“For Clinton not to come would mean further damage to Yeltsin and further isolation for Russia,” said John D. Steinbruner, director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. “Yeltsin’s relationship with Clinton is his major political asset. . . . Their mere appearance together . . . will reaffirm a degree of normalcy in the relationship.”

U.S. and Russian officials said the two-day Clinton-Yeltsin summit will cover the gamut of bilateral and global issues, including U.S. displeasure over the war in Chechnya and Russia’s sale of nuclear power technology to Iran; European security issues; dismantling Russian and American nuclear weapons, and progress toward economic and political reform in Russia.

Clinton also will describe for Yeltsin the political changes in Washington that will make it more difficult to provide the billions of dollars in economic aid that Clinton had pledged to assist the conversion of the Russian economy, aides said.

Clinton will stop in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, on his way back to Washington. There, aides said, he will meet with President Leonid Kuchma to discuss Western aid issues, retiring nuclear weapons and Ukraine’s efforts to prevent the secession of Crimea, whose Russian ethnic majority wants to create an independent state allied with Russia.

Russians are fiercely proud of the role the Soviet Union played in the Nazi defeat--at a cost of 20 million military and civilian lives. Some still see the World War II victory as the crowning achievement of the Soviet regime that failed its citizens in so many other respects.

Yeltsin, who like Clinton faces uncertain reelection prospects next year, is eager to show that the war in Chechnya has not cost him Western approval. “Clinton’s presence in Moscow will be used to the maximum by Yeltsin’s propaganda machine,” said Andrei V. Kortunov, an analyst at Moscow’s U.S.A. and Canada Institute.

In return, Yeltsin has promised to stage-manage the Red Square parade to not embarrass his American guest. The parade will consist only of World War II veterans, not the military hardware that was being used even Monday to pound the defiant breakaway region of Chechnya.

As Russia’s war in Chechnya marked its 100th day on Monday, Russian artillery and warplanes struck south and east of Grozny, the republic’s capital, at three towns where determined rebel fighters continue to thwart the Russian advance. Though the ferocity of the fighting has ebbed recently, there is no sign that the ever more embittered Chechen population is inclined to surrender to the despised Russian invaders.

Yeltsin is apparently betting that the intensity of the resistance will fade by the time Clinton arrives on May 9 and that “everyone will be sick of watching it on CNN,” Kortunov said.

But Chechens still feel betrayed and enraged. Clinton “has failed to defend the values of Western civilization,” Salman G. Vatsanayev, a philosophy professor and leader of the Chechen Council of Elders in Moscow, said Monday.

Broder reported from Washington and Efron from Moscow.