Albright Gives Details of Arms Cut to Russians

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Thursday gave Russian leaders their first detailed look at an Atlantic alliance offer to unilaterally cut arms levels in Europe, but it remained unclear how far the proposal would go toward dampening Moscow’s opposition to an eastward NATO expansion.

Albright spent an hour with Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin and more than three hours with her Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov, after arriving here from London on the sixth stop of a nine-nation round-the-world trip.

She is scheduled to see ailing Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin today.

According to senior U.S. officials, Primakov met Albright first for an unscheduled, hourlong private meeting at which note-takers were present before adjourning to a larger session with full delegations and a working dinner. “We had some good initial meetings and got down to the work of getting to know each other,” Albright told reporters. “We established a very good working relationship.”

U.S. officials described the meetings as “very constructive, very detailed discussions” that covered the sensitive issue of NATO enlargement, the unilateral alliance offer to reduce its conventional weapons levels and the idea of a NATO-Russian charter to set a framework for a cooperative relationship between Moscow and its former Cold War enemies. “It was really very detailed,” one official said.

Albright and Primakov exchanged toasts over a dinner of sturgeon, caviar and jellied prunes; this meeting was said to have become less than the planned working session and more of a social occasion punctuated by jokes.

But if Albright succeeded in establishing a working relationship with Primakov, there were few signs of softening in Moscow’s resistance to the planned expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, probably to include Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary.

Only a few hours before meeting Albright, Primakov emerged from talks with Italian Foreign Minister Lamberto Dini to say that Moscow would not drop its opposition to NATO expansion. “Russia has a negative position and will continue to hold that position,” he said.

Albright’s talks with Chernomyrdin focused on setting the agenda for next month’s summit in Helsinki, Finland, between President Clinton and Yeltsin--a meeting that U.S. officials hope will generate a breakthrough on the NATO enlargement issue.

Albright’s meetings with Primakov ended too late for official reaction. But a commentary from the “Vesti” news program on state-run television did give a cautious welcome to the NATO offer to cut conventional arms unilaterally, describing it as “a more serious idea than the ridiculous proposal to create a joint Russian-NATO military brigade and thus appear to satisfy Moscow’s desire to be involved in alliance affairs.”

But “Vesti” also observed that the “welcoming smiles” exchanged by Albright and Primakov were probably intended to mask the adversarial nature of their talks. “Both have long been fierce proponents of an active and offensive foreign policy, so their views on NATO expansion are diametrically opposite.”

Among the more ominous of warnings over the consequences of NATO expansion was deputy Security Council chief Boris S. Berezovsky’s insistence that such moves are “pushing us toward aggressive confrontation.” He told the Echo of Moscow radio station that an alliance expansion was “impermissible” without a veto right for Russia.

Albright ended her first day by taking questions on a global Internet hookup that brought 3,000 schools in 47 countries onto a world-wide chat line. Sitting at a computer terminal in a U.S. government-sponsored information center here, she managed to answer only a few of the questions.

Taking a question from a student at Kent Denver School, an institution she attended as a teenager, she answered, “I loved Kent, but I never dreamed that I could become secretary of State. Even though Kent [then] was a girls school, we never thought that we could be in a position to make decisions.”

Times staff writer Carol J. Williams contributed to this report.