Russia Backs Off From Threats

Russia’s top leaders assailed the United States for trying to dominate world affairs but gingerly backed away Thursday from the threat of military confrontation over NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

President Boris N. Yeltsin, while warning that Russia could resort to “extreme measures,” said he had decided to avoid direct conflict with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and will continue to seek a peaceful resolution of the dispute between Serbs and ethnic Albanians over the region of Kosovo.

“We are above America in the moral aspect,” Yeltsin said during a brief television appearance.

The NATO air raids sparked a day of anti-American protests.

Demonstrators pelted the U.S. Embassy with bottles of ink and beer. Some protesters said they were ready to volunteer to go to Yugoslavia and fight Americans.

However, Russia, with its economy in a deep depression and its armed forces in disarray, has little choice but to sit on the sidelines as the alliance pounds the nation that much of Russia regards as a little brother.

For Russia, it is yet another humiliating lesson that in the post-Soviet order, it no longer gets to call any of the shots.

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia has had difficulty adjusting to a world where it has marginal influence.

While the U.S. can dispatch B-2 Stealth bombers from Missouri to drop ordnance anywhere on the planet, Russia can barely feed its soldiers.

Russians have an affinity for the Serbs. Both are Slavic people and share the Orthodox Christian religion. Both spent decades under Communist dictatorship. Both have waged vicious ethnic wars, the Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Russians in Chechnya.

Many Russians hold the egocentric theory that the assault on Yugoslavia is an attack on Russia. The real goal of the United States, they maintain, is to encircle Russia and isolate it: NATO’s recently completed eastward expansion to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic was a first step; then came the bombing of Iraq to the south. Now the United States is attempting to neutralize Yugoslavia. Next, they fear, will come Russia.

“Regardless of what arguments are now used by the Americans to justify these actions, their true aims are obvious: to impose on the world the political, military and economic dictates of the United States, to establish in the 21st century a unipolar world in which the destinies of nations will be decided in Washington,” Russian Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov said.

Contributing to Russia’s appearance of powerlessness is its inability to persuade Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, a traditional ally, to compromise on Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the dominant of the two Yugoslav republics.

Russia was a major participant in the negotiations that came up with a peace plan acceptable to the Kosovo Albanians, but even Russia’s negotiators could not get Milosevic to sign it. While arguing against NATO airstrikes, Russia has not come up with any better solution than to resume negotiating.

“Russia’s only plan of action to resolve the conflict in Kosovo has always been to try and talk Milosevic into accepting the peace plan,” said Alexander O. Filonik, executive director of the Russian Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Considering the fact that they didn’t succeed, we can say that Russia doesn’t have a plan now.”

On Wednesday, Yeltsin warned that the airstrikes could spawn a wider war in Europe. He said that if the conflict worsened, Russia reserved the right to defend itself.

But Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov, who canceled a trip to Washington on Tuesday when he learned airstrikes were inevitable, said Thursday that Russia will not be sucked into a military conflict.

“Nobody is dragging the country into war,” he said. “We want to preserve our relations with everybody. We do not want to be isolated.”

Primakov is attempting to revive Russia’s economy by securing multibillion-dollar loans from the West. One of the purposes of his aborted trip to Washington had been to meet with the head of the International Monetary Fund, Michel Camdessus.

Western leaders, who wish to maintain good relations with Russia, said the cancellation of the meetings and Russia’s protest over the bombings will not jeopardize the loan talks.

Camdessus is now scheduled to arrive in Moscow on Saturday to meet with Primakov.

In an interview on the television news show “Hero of the Day,” Primakov indicated that he was willing to try once again to persuade Milosevic to accept the Kosovo peace plan--but only after NATO halts its airstrikes.

“We are ready at any time to help conduct negotiations with Milosevic,” Primakov said. “We are ready to exert influence, ready to ask Yugoslavia to be more flexible and so on, but only under certain conditions, the first of which is the immediate halt of the bombing.”

To protest the bombing, Russia withdrew its representative to NATO and threatened to recall its troops helping to keep the peace in Bosnia. At the United Nations, Russia submitted a resolution strongly condemning NATO aggression.

Outside the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, the anti-American protest turned ugly as demonstrators hurled objects and broke windows.

Two Russian police officers were injured attempting to move protesters away from the embassy.

“How much longer should we tolerate that America does what it wants and always gets away with it?” asked Boris Kurkin, 31, a beer-drinking protester and former soldier eager to enlist in Yugoslavia’s cause.

“I am ready to go there and knock some sense into American heads with an AK-47 in my hands.”