U.S., Russia Commit to Arms-Control Talks

The United States and Russia pledged Tuesday to push hard for new arms-control agreements during President Clinton’s final months in office, senior administration officials said.

The commitments, made during a brief White House meeting between Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov, came after this month’s long-awaited ratification of the START II arms treaty by both houses of the Russian parliament.

While neither Clinton nor Ivanov made any public statements after Tuesday’s session, a U.S. official said Ivanov conveyed a message from President-elect Vladimir V. Putin declaring his intention to “work hard on questions of strategic stability and arms control.”

Other officials said Clinton assured his visitor that he is committed to preserving the 28-year-old Antiballistic Missile Treaty, despite Washington’s efforts to develop an antimissile system to guard against threats from small, isolated states. Many independent arms-control specialists predict that Clinton’s balancing act on the ABM treaty will be extremely difficult.

Ivanov had a working dinner Tuesday with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. He was scheduled to discuss arms control and other issues, including the war in the separatist republic of Chechnya and Russian economic reforms, at a longer meeting with her today. Meanwhile, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott held intensive talks on arms control with his Russian counterpart, Georgy Mamedov.

At one level, the series of meetings marks the beginning of preparations for the first Clinton-Putin summit, scheduled for early June in Moscow. At another level, however, the Ivanov visit to Washington is the start of an effort by Clinton and Putin to breathe new life into a U.S.-Russian relationship that has suffered a series of damaging setbacks over the past three years.

U.S. officials note that the diplomatic calendar will bring Putin and Clinton together on at least two other occasions this year--at a July summit of the world’s leading industrialized nations in Okinawa, Japan, and at a meeting of Pacific Rim leaders later in the year in Brunei. But by definition, the effort to repair relations carries a sense of urgency, with Clinton now in his final nine months in office and Putin, who was elected by an ample margin last month, obviously eager to establish his credentials as a “can-do” leader.

“Nobody wants to waste time,” one official said.

Major differences separate the two sides, and the Russians arrived in Washington clearly energized by recent events that have provided Moscow with a sense of political momentum unknown in Russia much of the time during former President Boris N. Yeltsin’s final years in office.

The Russian vote on START II not only gave long-overdue formal approval to a treaty that had languished in parliament for years but also signaled Putin’s ability to work with parliament--and therefore effectively push a political agenda.

That development, coupled with the lower house’s ratification Friday of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, seemed to give Russia a confidence boost at home and some valuable propaganda points in the global debate on nuclear arms. The U.S. Senate rejected the treaty last year.

The Clinton administration thus finds itself on the defensive, trying to justify to world opinion its efforts to build an antimissile system that many fear could weaken existing treaties.

“For the last five years, the United States has been going into discussions with Russia from a position of moral strength. It ratified START II, negotiated [the test ban treaty] and told the Russians they needed to get their act together,” noted Jon Wolfsthal, an arms-control specialist at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Well, [now] the Russian act is together. They are in a strong position at a time the United States is effectively isolated even from its European allies.”

In a related development, congressional budget analysts issued a new--and higher--estimate Tuesday of what it would cost to build a national antimissile system, in a move that may increase political resistance to the hotly debated project.

In a formal report, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that it would cost $29 billion through 2015 to build and operate a single-site land-based system to shield the United States from a small number of enemy missiles. That’s up more than $3 billion from the Pentagon’s estimate of about $25.6 billion for the first phase of the system. The CBO reached a higher estimate because it calculated higher prices for construction and flight tests, Pentagon officials noted.

Some analysts fear that Clinton, under pressure from congressional Republicans to develop an antimissile system, might concede too much to Moscow in negotiations for further cuts in nuclear weapons. The U.S. has committed to a ceiling of 2,500 warheads as a goal for a START III treaty. Moscow, which struggles to maintain its aging weapons, wants a limit of 1,500.

While the momentum of world opinion appeared to be going Moscow’s way on arms control, Russian efforts to contain the political fallout from its messy war in Chechnya suffered a setback Tuesday when the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva passed a resolution calling on Moscow to investigate alleged human rights violations in the republic.

State Department spokesman James P. Rubin hailed the vote, saying it showed that “the international community wants to ensure that there is an independent investigation of the human rights abuses that have been reported in Chechnya.”

The United States has consistently criticized Moscow’s military action in Chechnya, in which a large number of civilians have died.

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Times staff writer Paul Richter contributed to this report.