Yeltsin Walks Softly on Eve of Pact With NATO

PARIS — After roaring out of Moscow like the proverbial winter lion Monday with warnings that further NATO expansion could destabilize Europe, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin purred to his Parisian hosts that today’s historic accord with the alliance means that “all Europe won” the Cold War.

Yeltsin even hinted that he might attend the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Madrid in July, when the Western defense bloc is expected to issue the first invitations for membership to countries once in the Kremlin’s political orbit.

“No concrete decision has been made yet,” Yeltsin’s spokesman, Sergei V. Yastrzhembsky, said of the president’s possible attendance in Madrid.

But the Russian leader, who has in the past categorically rejected the notion of taking part in the NATO expansion ceremony, “has undergone a significant change of opinion” about the character of the meeting where enlargement will become a reality and plans to reassess its implications for Russian national interests, Yastrzhembsky said.

Yeltsin’s presence at an event Russians have long cast as a colossal threat to European harmony and stability would seemingly embrace the view of President Clinton and other Western leaders that Russia has nothing to fear in NATO’s approach.

During an Elysee Palace dinner for Yeltsin, French President and summit host Jacques Chirac described the charter as “a great political success for Russia,” Yastrzhembsky said.

Yeltsin flew to Paris for a brief meeting with Chirac ahead of the signing of a charter with the 16-nation military pact that effectively bonds Cold War adversaries in the common cause of ensuring European peace and security into the next century.

Clinton will meet with the Russian leader after the ceremony at which Yeltsin and NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana will formally conclude the agreement that offers assurances to Moscow that the alliance has no plans to station nuclear weapons on the prospective new members’ territory.

Yeltsin warned as he left Moscow that any attempt to incorporate former Soviet republics in NATO would “completely undermine Russia’s relations with NATO.”

The alliance is expected to offer membership to Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic this summer, while leaving the appeals of other ex-Communist states for consideration only at a later and unspecified date.

Among the most ardent applicants are the three Baltic republics--Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania--which were forced into the Soviet Union at the start of World War II.

While it now seems clear that none of the three Baltic states will be offered invitations to join NATO at Madrid, State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns stressed that no European country could be excluded from consideration.

“We’ve shown that we want the Baltics oriented toward Western institutions,” he said.

The U.S. plans to issue a statement, possibly in the form of a charter, at the Madrid summit pledging support for Baltic aspirations and underscoring the right of those countries to join NATO at some future time.

Burns added that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and French Foreign Minister Herve de Charette for the first time held detailed discussions Monday on the pros and cons of specific candidates for NATO membership.

“A number of specific countries were discussed,” he said. “There was a lot of back and forth on several countries. They discussed individual countries and agreed on some.”

While Yeltsin has acknowledged the inevitability of NATO absorbing new members from Central and Eastern Europe, he still steadfastly refuses to concede that the Russia-NATO charter constitutes Moscow’s endorsement of expansion.

Instead, Yeltsin and other Russian leaders have consistently cast enlargement as a dangerous misjudgment and the charter as a Kremlin success in containing the risks.

“The simple fact of signing the charter does not in any way signify acceptance” of the enlargement policy of NATO, Yastrzhembsky insisted.

“What this document does is significantly minimize the damage for Russia and other states from the expansion of NATO to the east,” Yastrzhembsky said of the charter.

The document creates the first formal NATO-Russia council for deliberating European security issues, and it gives the Kremlin a voice, though not a veto, in many areas of alliance activity and decision-making.

Yeltsin’s critics in Russia have cast his acceptance of the charter as capitulation to the Western alliance and as a humiliating reminder of which side won the Cold War.

Washington and its allies insist that there are no losers under the agreement, but it has come at a price for the alliance as well as a loss of face for Russia. In return for dropping its earlier strident campaign against expansion, Russia has won some trade and economic considerations, including an elevated role in the Group of Seven industrialized nations that will meet for the first time as “the Summit of the Eight” in Denver next month.

Russian officials also have made clear that they will raise the stakes in any future expansion moves, particularly if the alliance attempts to incorporate any former Soviet territory.

Yeltsin’s message as he prepared to sign the charter appeared to be that the first wave of expansion was unavoidable--because of the stubborn positions occupied by its proponents--but that a similar move regarding former Soviet territory would be perceived as a betrayal.

A senior Russian diplomat told journalists in Moscow late last week that the new NATO members to be invited this summer will have “the status of second-best countries” and that further expansion is highly unlikely due to the political costs it would entail.

Times staff writers Tyler Marshall in Paris and Vanora Bennett in Moscow contributed to this report.