Albright Listens to Russia’s Gripes

With U.S.-Russian relations more tense than at any time since the end of the Cold War, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright alternated between tough talk and soothing reassurance here Monday as she explained Clinton administration policy on missile defense and a host of global trouble spots.

“We want a Russia that is confident, that will fulfill its potential as a global force for peace and justice and against crime and terror,” Albright told Russian democracy advocates in her only public appearance of the day after arriving in Moscow for a high-profile visit.

But the message she delivered in private to Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov, Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov, Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov and others had a harder edge: The United States values its relationship with Russia, but not enough to change its basic policies.

A senior State Department official said that Washington and Moscow have disagreed in the past on all of the issues that are now troubling the relationship but that it is unusual for the problems to pile up at once.

Albright’s longest meeting Monday was a three-hour dinner with Primakov, which officials said was devoted primarily to discussing Russia’s troubled economy.

Although Albright’s published schedule included a telephone conversation with ailing President Boris N. Yeltsin, who is hospitalized with a stomach ulcer, the call never took place. State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said they may talk today.

Friction between U.S. and Russian officials was most obvious on an issue that many Americans had long forgotten--missile defense. The administration said earlier this month that it is considering a system to shield U.S. cities from the danger posed by missile and nuclear arms programs in Iran, North Korea and other “rogue” states.

U.S. officials concede that such a program, if it goes ahead, will require amendments to the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which was negotiated in 1972 with the Soviet Union. The purpose of the pact was to prevent either nuclear superpower from developing a defense that would be good enough to tempt it to launch a preemptive nuclear attack.

Albright and her top aides repeatedly sought to assure Russian officials that the U.S. system would not be deployed before 2005 and would not be directed at Moscow’s strategic missile force, but the Russians seemed unconvinced.

From the U.S. viewpoint, the system would not change the strategic relationship because Russia would remain for the indefinite future the only power with enough offensive weapons to overwhelm the defense system.

“There are a different set of threats out there right now than were there during the height of the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union were threats to each other,” Albright told reporters early Monday on her flight into Moscow.

But viewed from Moscow, U.S. discussion about revising the ABM treaty is another sign that Washington no longer considers Russia a major power.

Gennady N. Seleznyov, chairman of the lower house of parliament, spoke about his meeting with Albright in a Russian television interview. “I told her I didn’t understand why there have been so many attempts to run Russia down,” he said.

The Russian news agency Itar-Tass quoted Col. Gen. Leonid Ivashov, head of international cooperation at the Defense Ministry, as accusing the U.S. of showing disdain for arms control agreements.

He dismissed U.S. warnings about Iran and North Korea, accusing Washington of “artificially inflaming the situation, despite knowing perfectly well that these countries do not have a nuclear capability.”

American officials traveling with Albright agreed that Iran and North Korea lack nuclear weapons now. But these officials, citing recent missile tests by both countries combined with suspicious nuclear programs, said the danger cannot be discounted.

One senior State Department official came close to accusing the Russian government of hypocrisy.

“It may strike us as a little bit unfair for them to be concerned about the ABM treaty needing to be amended to defend against, say, an Iranian missile threat 10 years from now, when they are not doing all they can . . . to prevent their side from working with Iran on a long-range missile or medium-range missile,” the official said.

Russian officials were equally sensitive about last month’s U.S.-British air attack on Iraq, about Washington’s threat to use force to prevent violent repression in the Serbian province of Kosovo and about U.S. sanctions imposed recently on three Russian enterprises suspected of aiding Iran’s nuclear program.

Luzhkov, the Moscow mayor and a potential presidential candidate next year, berated Albright on all four points, said a senior State Department official. Albright sought to “clarify” the U.S. position on each.

“It was quite cordial, but no ground was given on either side,” the official said.

At the same time, both U.S. and Russian officials offered assurances that the decline in relations can be stopped before it produces the sort of genuine hostility that marked the Cold War.

“The whole point here is to engage Russia,” Albright said. “I think we spent a great deal of time for 50 years seeing Russia as monolithic, and talking only about the Kremlin. Therefore, the whole situation is entirely different in a pluralistic [Russia], and a lot of different things are going on.”