Clinton and Putin Broach Missile Issue

Eschewing first-name familiarity, President Clinton and President Vladimir V. Putin--one nearing his departure from office, the other just arriving--plunged into wide-ranging discussions Saturday night as U.S.-Russian relations appeared to be approaching an anxious moment.

With Russia and the United States facing one of their greatest new divisions over the sort of nuclear-weapons issues that dominated the Washington-Moscow discourse during the Cold War, the two presidents spoke at least briefly about the question of building defenses against long-range missiles.

And in their first meeting since Putin was inaugurated four weeks ago, a senior Clinton administration official said, they managed a verbal tour of the world’s trouble spots, among them the Balkans and the Caucasus; the strategic nuclear balance; and threats to international trade.

Also among the topics under discussion was a possible agreement to dispose of enough plutonium to make thousands of nuclear weapons.

But officials refused to go into the substance of the meeting or even to characterize the session, the first of two planned during Clinton’s barely 30 hours here. The Russians said even less.

The senior U.S. official presented the meeting--an unusual Saturday night encounter that lasted 2 hours, 45 minutes--as both “businesslike” and “congenial.” White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart said the two leaders turned to the business of superpower summitry within five minutes of Clinton’s arrival at Putin’s personal rooms on the third floor of the Kremlin.

Clinton and Putin appeared to be approaching the weekend summit as an opportunity to take the measure of the other. They had met only twice previously--in New Zealand last September and in Oslo last November, when Putin was former President Boris N. Yeltsin’s prime minister.

But the Moscow summit also offers an opportunity to explore their still-evolving positions on the newest potential tear in the superpower fabric: that of missile defense.

Clinton has said that, by the end of the summer, he will decide whether to go ahead with a weapons system intended to defend the United States against long-range nuclear missiles. The White House has said such a system would be intended to defend against a limited nuclear strike, but critics have worried that by lessening the potential damage from Russia’s sizable nuclear weapons arsenal, the program would upset the strategic balance.

Putin has begun to talk about his own proposal, in which the superpowers would cooperate in developing a different sort of defense, one intended to intercept missiles at their launch rather than the higher-altitude targeting envisioned by the Americans. The objective would be to defend the United States, Russia and Europe against attack by such “rogue” states as North Korea and Iraq, or by terrorists.

Neither technology has been developed.

But Saturday night’s session was presented not so much as one of hard bargaining as one of exploring the presidents’ different views of the world. Clinton may be a known quantity to the Russians, but he and Putin have not had an opportunity to develop a personal relationship. Until his abrupt resignation from office Dec. 31, Yeltsin was the only Russian president with whom Clinton had dealt, and they made much of being on a chummy “Boris and Bill” footing.

Still, the U.S. official said of Clinton’s meeting with Putin, “there was a very easygoing nature to the conversation. It was quite clear that they knew each other, that they knew a lot about each other’s positions, and they were very interested in hearing directly from each other about each other’s positions.

“There was a sense of picking up on a number of issues, which both have been dealing with, with each other, albeit when Mr. Putin was in a different capacity,” the official said. “It was a combination of both teeing-up issues, which will be discussed tomorrow, but also delving quite deeply into some of those issues between the two of them.”

Clinton and Putin spent most of their time in what Lockhart described as the Russian leader’s personal quarters--but not his residence--in the Kremlin, joined by Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and Sergei E. Prikhodko, Putin’s foreign affairs advisor.

And not a small slice of this first president-to-president meeting was spent at the table, which was laden with blini; cold, spicy boiled wild boar; baked stag ham; cabbage soup; trout; goose in a berry sauce; and red wine. They finished off the meal with plombir--described by one who had tasted it as “a very fancy, rich ice cream dessert”--and, later, a private jazz performance.

During a break from the table, Putin took Clinton on a tour of his book-lined study and a small chapel--the Russian president has taken to drawing public attention to his religious side--and a small workout room that included a universal gym machine and a massage table, as well as guest quarters.

U.S. officials are working to learn more about Putin, whose earlier government career was in espionage, including a five-year stint with the KGB in East Germany, and they managed to lift one small window on Putin: “He dropped in a couple of English words from time to time,” the senior official said.

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Times staff writer Richard C. Paddock contributed to this report.