Clinton Backs Off Treaty Threat, Will Visit Russia

Tacitly admitting failure in his efforts to bluff the Russian parliament into ratifying a key arms control agreement, President Clinton announced Monday that he will visit Moscow in early September for a summit with President Boris N. Yeltsin.

The decision restores the normal schedule for U.S.-Russian summits, lifting Clinton’s previous declaration that he would travel to Moscow only after the Russian Duma, or lower house of parliament, ratified the stalled START II treaty.

In a one-paragraph statement, the White House said that Clinton “underscored the vitality of the U.S.-Russian relationship and looks forward to engaging President Yeltsin and the Russian leadership on a broad range of issues.”

It said that Vice President Al Gore and Russian Prime Minister Sergei V. Kiriyenko will help prepare an agenda for the talks during a previously scheduled July 23-24 meeting in the Russian capital.

The September session will be the first full summit for Clinton and Yeltsin since they met in the Finnish capital, Helsinki, in March 1997. It is expected to focus on Russia’s economic difficulties and on the tensions in the Balkans.

In a breach of normal protocol, first word of the meeting came from Russia’s Interfax news agency. The White House confirmed the report a few hours later.

*

Experts on Russian politics in both Washington and Moscow said Clinton committed a serious blunder by trying to link his Moscow trip with Duma consideration of START II because the parliament, controlled by Yeltsin’s Communist and ultranationalist opposition, has no incentive to facilitate Clinton-Yeltsin talks. If anything, some experts said, the Duma probably considers disruption of the summit reason enough to block treaty ratification.

“It is almost always a mistake to link travel and high-level meetings to some action,” said Richard Haass, director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “If it doesn’t happen, you don’t want to not be able to go. It is useful that he is going. The bottom line is Russia is too important to stay away from. The relationship is too important to hold it hostage to something that happens in this one area.”

Alistair Millar, a senior analyst at the pro-arms-control group the British-American Security Information Council, said it was “absolute nonsense” for Clinton to issue the ultimatum because Yeltsin has demonstrated that his influence with the Duma is limited.

Yeltsin and then-President Bush signed START II on Jan. 3, 1993, just two weeks before Clinton’s inauguration. The pact, probably the broadest disarmament treaty ever, requires each country to reduce its nuclear stockpile by about two-thirds and bans missiles with more than one warhead. The United States would be allowed to keep 3,500 warheads and Russia would be permitted to retain 3,000.

Russian negotiators accepted the warhead disparity because Moscow could not deploy more than 3,000 single-warhead weapons without developing an expensive new class of missiles. The arsenal Russia inherited from the Soviet Union was top-heavy with multiple-warhead weapons prohibited by the treaty.

Nevertheless, the opposition-controlled Duma refused to ratify START II, claiming that the treaty would relegate Russia to a permanently subservient strategic relationship with the United States.

*

A deputy of the Duma confirmed Monday that the parliament remains ill-disposed toward ratifying START II any time soon.

“Before the document is debated, the deputies should be comprehensibly explained Russia’s nuclear security concept, on which its defense capability depends in the long run, so that they could make a clear-cut decision which political and military tasks require nuclear weapons,” insisted Andrei Nikolayev, a general who serves in the Duma.

*

Kempster reported from Washington and Williams from Moscow.