Kohl Gives Yeltsin Support on Financial Moves, With Strings Attached

German Chancellor Helmut Kohl praised visiting Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin on Tuesday for skillful handling of his country’s latest financial crisis--a vote of confidence in wobbly Russian markets that should help calm jittery foreign investors.

But Kohl’s support appeared to come with political strings attached, as Yeltsin and the seven Russian Cabinet ministers who traveled here with him for a two-day summit tempered their comments about the violence in Serbia’s Kosovo province to avoid any open conflict with their hosts.

Russia is a staunch ally of Serbian-led Yugoslavia and had earlier denounced all suggestions from Western powers that NATO forces be deployed along Kosovo’s border with neighboring Albania to guard against ethnic expulsions and cross-border bloodletting. Kremlin leaders have routinely rejected military responses as crude interference into what they describe as Yugoslavia’s internal affairs.

But in the political and economic talks Yeltsin and his ministers held here, the Russian and German sides proclaimed full mutual understanding and agreement.

Kohl told journalists at a news conference capping their summit that Yeltsin had promised to use his influence with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, whose heavily armed police have been driving Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians out of the province and burning their homes.

Thousands of Kosovo Albanians have taken refuge across the border in Albania, already the poorest and most backward country in Europe. This prompted both the United States and the European Union to impose stiff new sanctions Monday on Yugoslavia, which, on Tuesday, denounced those economic penalties as unfair interference in its internal affairs.

“We will meet and work out how to get out of this situation,” Yeltsin said. Kremlin spokesman Sergei V. Yastrzhembsky added later that a face-to-face meeting between Yeltsin and the Yugoslav strongman was being arranged.

Russians and Serbs share Slavic roots and the Orthodox Christian religion. Their close traditional ties have made the Kremlin one of Belgrade’s few allies over the past seven years of ethnic violence in former Yugoslav republics. Moscow turned a blind eye to Serbian nationalists’ “ethnic cleansing” of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina and has echoed Belgrade’s condemnation of Kosovo Albanians as armed insurgents.

But on the fringes of the Russian-German talks held here Monday and Tuesday, Russian officials were striking a more moderate pose. “I share the concerns of the German people over the situation in Kosovo,” Yeltsin said. “All countries should understand that we will work closely with Helmut Kohl on this and stay in regular contact.”

Kohl noted that Germany had taken in almost 250,000 Bosnian and Croatian refugees during the earlier conflicts in the former Yugoslav federation, providing them a haven but at staggering cost. Germany spent 15 billion marks, nearly $8.5 billion, to care for the Balkan refugees, Kohl said.

Describing the Kosovo conflict as another destabilizing confrontation with potentially severe consequences for Germany, Kohl said he had appealed to Yeltsin to use his personal sway with the Serbs. “We both agreed that the civil war must be brought to an end,” Kohl said. “And the Russian president has great influence to exert in this matter.”

On Monday, Russian Defense Minister Igor D. Sergeyev made the unusual statement that Moscow would have no objection to intervention by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the Kosovo conflict if such a deployment were approved by the U.N. Security Council.

As a permanent member of the Security Council, Russia could veto any military intervention plan. But Sergeyev and the other Kremlin envoys restrained themselves from making such observations--possibly aware of the reluctance of many countries within the Western military alliance to get bogged down in another complicated and dangerous Balkan conflict.

Albanian nationalists seeking unification with their ethnic brothers in Yugoslavia have been smuggling weapons from Albania into Kosovo, ostensibly to protect the Kosovo Albanians from Serbian repression. But as tensions and the level of armaments rise, foreign mediators fear the looming confrontation could quickly escalate into bloody violence that would even eclipse that of the deadly conflict that gripped Bosnia for four years.

Apparently in return for cooperation in the Kosovo crisis, Kohl praised Yeltsin’s government for its handling of the financial turmoil without backing away from market reforms. “These measures contribute significantly to increasing the confidence of foreign investors. Germany will continue supporting the reform process with great commitment,” Kohl told Yeltsin.

The Russian leader noted that Kohl’s personal support would be an important assurance for investors in Russia. Yeltsin, slimmed by successive bouts of illness, made a joke at the expense of his portly host in thanking Kohl for “putting your considerable weight” to work on Russia’s behalf.