‘Outraged’ Yeltsin Denounces U.S. Strikes

President Boris N. Yeltsin reacted with outspoken anger Friday to news of U.S. missile strikes in Afghanistan and Sudan, but Russian officials said that his denunciations will not affect a summit meeting with President Clinton due to take place in Moscow in September.

“My attitude is negative, as it would be to any act of terrorism, military interference or failure to solve a problem through negotiations,” Yeltsin said. “Therefore, I am outraged, and I deplore this act.”

Yeltsin’s anger focused on Clinton’s failure to consult with the leaders of other countries--including Russia--before allowing the attacks in Afghanistan and Sudan to go ahead.

“That was not done,” the Russian president told reporters in the Arctic city of Murmansk.

“You may ask whether I knew that the strike was going to be delivered yesterday. I can tell you honestly that I did not know about that. Therefore, it means that the whole world did not know. Therefore, it was an underhanded strike. This is all the more dishonest.”

Yeltsin, whose country is sinking into economic crisis again after its currency, the ruble, was devalued Monday, can ill afford to alienate the United States and other Western allies.

Aides rushed to interpret and soften the president’s harsh words.

His spokesman, Sergei V. Yastrzhembsky, suggested that the president was emotionally expressing a Russian desire for joint efforts to fight terrorism.

A “high-level source close to the top leadership” was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying that Yeltsin’s remarks would not affect the summit: “The summit will certainly take place despite Boris Yeltsin’s irritation about the lack of advance information from the United States about plans to hit military strikes against Sudan and Afghanistan.”

Clinton-Yeltsin summits have customarily been friendly, back-slapping affairs, stressing the friendship between the two presidents rather than any issues dividing their countries. The question of Afghanistan already was likely to be on next month’s agenda--along with arms control, Iraq, the conflict in the Serbian province of Kosovo and Russian technology sales to Iran.

Under Soviet rule, Moscow made a disastrous nine-year incursion into Afghanistan beginning in 1979. Although post-Soviet Russia no longer borders the mountainous state, three Central Asian former Soviet republics, among them Tajikistan, look on to Afghanistan along the former superpower’s old frontier.

Russia and Tajikistan signed a joint declaration of “deep unease” Thursday at the bloody civil war raging in northern Afghanistan and advancing uncomfortably close to this border.

The situation “presents a direct danger to the southern Commonwealth of Independent States borders,” the statement said, referring to the loose organization that links Russia and 11 other former Soviet republics.

Russia’s first deputy foreign minister, Boris Pastukhov, said Moscow has been working to put pressure on Pakistan, a country Russia has accused of providing weaponry to the Taliban militia that controls most of Afghanistan.