Conflicting Objectives Blur Russians’ Role in Bosnia : Europe: As Kremlin worries about ties to NATO, troops face grim prospect of being ordered by erstwhile Western enemies to kill longtime Serb friends.

On frozen swampland along the Volga River, Pvt. Andrei V. Bekuzarov crawls with his sniper rifle toward an imaginary target, imperceptible in a sheath of white cotton camouflage as he winnows through the snow.

While his aim is steady and his movement stealthy, the 19-year-old soldier training for duty with the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Bosnia-Herzegovina refuses to contemplate whom he is pretending to shoot.

Still wary of the Western alliance and generally sympathetic to the Serbs, Russian troops headed for the nationalist quagmire of the Balkans are finding it uncomfortable to ponder the possibility that they might be ordered by erstwhile enemies to act to the detriment of age-old friends.

“We will try to avoid that kind of situation,” Bekuzarov answers evasively when asked if he could use force against Russia’s traditional allies if ordered. “We don’t plan to shoot anyone. We will just be controlling the atmosphere.”

The landscape at the Kostroma paratroops’ base closely resembles northeastern Bosnia, and the maneuvers underway here are practice for the dangers they could face there. But political analysts warn that the greatest perils confronting the Bosnia-bound forces cannot be deterred by training, because the greatest perils are the ulterior motives of the mission itself.

Russia is sending a contingent of about 1,500 soldiers to Bosnia next month, ostensibly to do its share in an international effort to enforce the U.S.-brokered peace agreement reached in Dayton, Ohio, last month.

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But the mission is burdened, wary analysts say, with the Kremlin’s conflicting objectives of cooperating in an operation defined and led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization while insisting, for domestic purposes, on autonomy from the Western alliance.

The Russian paratroops will also have to live down the reputation gained by some of their colleagues in the now-defunct U.N. Protection Force as Bosnian Serb partisans and willing traders in a contraband munitions market.

Also at stake in the deployment is the future of U.S.-Russian relations, because a mutual success in Bosnia could alleviate Kremlin fears of NATO’s planned eastward expansion, or, conversely, a fiasco could intensify anti-Western feelings and cast NATO as a reinvigorated menace to Russia.

“There are lots of possibilities for the whole thing going sour,” says Pavel S. Felgenhauer, a respected military analyst and writer for the daily newspaper Segodnya. “Look at what happened between the Americans and the Italians in Somalia. They were allies, where America and Russia are not.”

If a peacekeeping effort among fellow NATO states could deteriorate into the kind of acrimonious infighting and refusal to obey orders that happened in Somalia, he says, the Bosnian mission’s chances for a better outcome are slim.

Russian Defense Minister Pavel S. Grachev agreed during negotiations with U.S. Defense Secretary William J. Perry last month that Russian troops would patrol a stretch of northeastern Bosnia in coordination with the U.S. Army unit based in Tuzla.

Moscow politicians have insisted that the Russian troops are independent of the NATO command chain, taking orders only from the Kremlin military hierarchy.

“Americans refuse to have their troops under foreign command, and we are the same,” says Anatoly I. Utkin, chief advisor to the foreign relations committee of the Duma, the lower house of parliament. “The Russian public would never allow that.”

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But Alexei G. Arbatov, a military analyst with the World Economics Institute in Moscow, terms the official claim of independence from NATO “a fig leaf that doesn’t fool anyone.”

“The Russian brigade will be part of the U.S. brigade, subordinate to the U.S. general and subordinate to NATO,” Arbatov insists.

The official line that Moscow will be commanding its own troops makes the mission more palatable to the fiery nationalist opposition on Russia’s political scene, says Andrei V. Kortunov, deputy director of the USA-Canada Institute in Moscow.

But the analysts note that the verbal camouflage will do little to protect President Boris N. Yeltsin and his defense chiefs from a public uproar if the Russian peacekeepers take or inflict casualties in operations ordered by NATO.

Russian forces have been assigned to patrol a slender stretch of land in northeastern Bosnia known as the Posavina Corridor that bridges two masses of Serb-held territory, flanked by Croats on one side and Muslim-led Bosnian government forces on the other.

If the Serbs wanted to move arms between their territories in contravention of the Dayton agreement, Russian troops could find themselves having to impose a policy that Moscow had no role in developing and alienating the Bosnian Serbs, whom the Russian leadership has cast as victims of Western aggression.

When NATO staged air raids against the Serbs in the summer to force an end to their artillery bombardments of U.N.-declared “safe areas,” Yeltsin denounced the operations as sheer aggression, and the Russian Foreign Ministry accused the Western alliance of “genocide.”

The troops training here in Kostroma insist that they are impartial, and officers argue that they would be undermining their own mission to look the other way at an attempt by any party to rearm.

“If there are more weapons, there will be more war,” says Capt. Vladimir M. Ivanov, who will be part of the Posavina deployment. “We will have to confiscate them if we want to prevent more fighting.”

Such vaunted aims, however, could fall victim to a discouraging disparity between pay for the Bosnia-bound forces and that for Russian troops who took part in the U.N. peacekeeping mission.

Russian soldiers under U.N. contract earned $800 a month--a huge sum in this country--while the peace enforcement contingent that will be patrolling alongside NATO will be paid from a Defense Ministry budget already depleted by Russia’s protracted campaign to prevent the secession of the rebellious republic of Chechnya.

With bonuses for hazardous duty applied, rank-and-file troops will earn up to 600,000 rubles a month, about $130, says Gen. Alexander N. Bespalov, commander of the paratroops division in Kostroma.

Even Col. Alexander I. Lentsov, the head of the Bosnian contingent, who has seen combat in Afghanistan and Chechnya, will earn only 1.5 million rubles, or about $325 a month.

The army’s call for volunteers for the Bosnian deployment has yielded far fewer than the desired 1,500 and is expected to prompt Defense Ministry officials to pressure those officers already in the Balkans as part of the U.N. force to stay on for the new operation--with a huge drop in pay.

“It could be the worst of two worlds, with the opposition saying, ‘Look, we have no influence on the decisions of NATO, and we don’t even get financed for our contribution,’ ” Kortunov says. “If the mission goes wrong and we suffer casualties, the argument will be that NATO put our guys at risk on the most dangerous front lines.

“But having said that, I don’t think the whole operation is doomed,” the political analyst says. “If it succeeds, it would set an important precedent, that Russia doesn’t have to be a member of NATO to be an integral part of an effective military force. . . . If it is a success story, it will mean a lot for international relations. But if it is a failure, the consequences will be even more significant.”

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The acid test of whether the Kremlin’s venture will pay off will become obvious with the planned reunion of central Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, with its Serb-held suburbs, Felgenhauer says.

“If there are going to be bad things happening in Sarajevo--houses burning, people running and American-led NATO forces being portrayed here as baby-killers--this will be taken by Russians very seriously,” he says. “If the Serbs flee from Sarajevo, a lot of moral ground will be lost, and people here will see the deployment as fostering ‘ethnic cleansing.’ ”

Meanwhile, the paratroops of the Kostroma division practice for the predictable hazards of their mission, outwardly indifferent to the political minefields that have been laid by their leaders.

“We don’t yet know what the limitations of the mission will be, but as military men we are prepared to deal with whatever happens,” says Lentsov, commander of the brigade bound for Bosnia. “We will fulfill the tasks put before us without hesitation.”