Albright Says She’ll Press Putin for Chechnya Pact

A flurry of diplomatic activity scheduled here early this week that was initially viewed by Russia as a way to boost its international prestige could instead find the Kremlin under intense pressure to end its bitter war in Chechnya, senior U.S. officials said Sunday.

Speaking to reporters just before her arrival in the Russian capital, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said she plans to press acting Russian President Vladimir V. Putin to seek a political settlement to the Chechen war when the two meet for the first time later this week.

“They are basically getting mired-down there . . . [and] the only solution is a political dialogue,” Albright said.

She said that when she and Putin meet Wednesday in the Kremlin, she will be “making clear to him . . . that Russia is isolating itself from the international community that they need to be very much a part of.”

Albright will be the first high-ranking member of the Clinton administration to meet face to face with Putin since he took over from President Boris N. Yeltsin on New Year’s Eve.

Albright and senior aides also made it clear that she will take up the Chechnya issue with her Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov, when they hold a day of talks today aimed at restoring a degree of trust and confidence to a U.S.-Russian relationship that has seriously deteriorated over the last year.

In addition to feeling heat from Albright, Russian leaders are also expected to come under pressure this week from an array of Muslim foreign ministers arriving here for a meeting Tuesday of representatives from Israel, more than 20 Arab states and other interested parties.

The meeting, to be co-chaired by Albright and Ivanov, was initially viewed by Moscow as a chance to bolster Russia’s flagging international prestige as well as showcase its role in a long-dormant, oft-overlooked component of the search for peace in the Middle East known as the multilateral peace process. The last meeting of foreign ministers from this grouping, which is concerned with longer-term regional development issues, was in 1993.

But in the two months since Ivanov first offered to host Tuesday’s meeting, the brutality of Moscow’s military operations in the mainly Muslim Russian republic of Chechnya has been the stuff of news accounts worldwide.

A senior State Department official said Chechnya was discussed in a meeting between Albright and Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa on Sunday in Davos, Switzerland, where both were attending the World Economic Forum conference.

U.S. officials said they have detected a hardening of Arab world opinion concerning the Chechnya issue in recent weeks and that what one official called a “strengthening of sentiments” was also apparent at the Davos forum, which drew several leading figures from Muslim countries.