Russians Keep Up Efforts to Defuse Gulf Crisis

The Kremlin’s embarrassing misstep--proclaiming a breakthrough in the Iraqi standoff, only to have Baghdad swiftly deny that any deal had been struck--may have punched new chinks in the armor of resolve girding Russian diplomats, but they continued scrambling Tuesday to head off another war in the Persian Gulf.

Russian officials stood unconvincingly behind their Monday claims that, thanks to Russian diplomacy, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was ready to make concessions to the U.N. Special Commission verifying Iraq’s disarmament moves.

But Iraq’s failure to deliver on Moscow’s promise that the standoff was being defused has cast Russia in the role of Baghdad’s puppet and confronted Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s leadership with the awkward choice of abandoning efforts to help the Iraqis or stubbornly standing by an unreliable ally.

Russian politicians and mass media have long spoken with one voice in condemning U.S. threats of airstrikes to force Iraqi compliance with U.N. resolutions. But as Foreign Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov’s repeated claims of influence with Baghdad have come to nothing, signs have appeared that confidence in his strategy may be waning.

The influential daily Izvestia issued a bitter commentary on Kremlin handling of the crisis in its early editions today, headlining its lead article: “Baghdad Publicly Humiliates Russia.”

“In front of the entire world, the country claiming the status of a superpower is literally begging Saddam Hussein to agree to comply with the U.N. resolution Moscow voted for,” Izvestia wrote.

Yeltsin’s political opponents continued to side staunchly with Baghdad, casting the Iraqi leadership, with which the Soviet Union maintained close ties, as the victim of U.S. aggression.

At an emergency session of the Duma, the rowdy lower house of parliament controlled by Communist and nationalist opponents of Yeltsin, the deputies adopted a resolution calling on Russia to use its U.N. Security Council veto in any vote on the use of force against Iraq.

The Duma declaration also “resolutely condemns attempts to blackmail Iraq with the threat of using nuclear weapons,” the Interfax news agency reported.

Even the moderate pro-government faction, Our Home Is Russia, warned that any resort to force by the United States would probably damage U.S.-Russian relations and make it impossible to secure ratification of the START II disarmament treaty.

“The military conflict over Iraq may trigger a third world war. . . ,” Duma Chairman Gennady N. Seleznyov, a Communist, told reporters during the debate.

Among the symbolic threats issued by the Duma, which has little real power under Russia’s strong presidency, was a call for the abandonment of U.N. economic sanctions against Iraq if any Western power resorts to force.

Meantime, Deputy Foreign Minister Viktor Posuvalyuk, the Kremlin’s special emissary, remained in Baghdad for further talks and was prepared to stay as long as necessary, Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady Tarasov told journalists at a briefing.

Kremlin officials may be wavering over the so-far-fruitless efforts of Primakov to avert airstrikes by persuading Iraq to abide by the U.N. resolutions prohibiting its possession of weapons of mass destruction. But in the current political atmosphere, with many Russians suffering from deep insecurity over their lost superpower status, Yeltsin and his strategists are unlikely to publicly change allegiances, even if Hussein continues to burn his Russian supporters.

Despite Iraq’s own denial that any breakthrough had been achieved, Kremlin spokesman Sergei V. Yastrzhembsky repeated Tuesday that the diplomatic intervention of Posuvalyuk “is continuing and is bringing positive results.”

“There have been shifts in the Iraqi position toward meeting the demands of the world community,” Yastrzhembsky told a Kremlin briefing.

But Primakov, who speaks Arabic and has long-standing ties with the Iraqi leadership, told the Duma session he attended that he had “no plans for visiting Baghdad personally in the near future.”