NATO Get-Together in Baltics Has Russia Miffed, Staying Away

Don’t look now, but NATO is invading.

For the first time, NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly has met on the territory of the former Soviet Union--in Vilnius, Lithuania--and the chief question before it is how the alliance should expand.

It is a topic and setting that has ruffled feathers in Moscow, which remains adamant that there is no reason for the Atlantic alliance to keep getting bigger--and especially no reason that the former Soviet republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia should join.

A spokesman for the assembly, Keith Williams, said the meeting, which has drawn about 250 lawmakers from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 19 member states and from 16 of the assembly’s 17 “partner” states, is more than a symbolic gesture.

“The assembly as a whole is in favor of NATO’s enlargement,” he said. “Our pitch is, yes, we must keep the door open and, yes, we must enlarge.”

Only parliament members from Russia have boycotted the meeting, saying their presence in Vilnius might be misinterpreted as acquiescence to Lithuania’s eventual admission to NATO.

NATO Secretary-General George Robertson has visited Moscow twice in the past year and intends to come again next week, in part to assuage Russian concerns about enlargement. “It is absolutely wrong to present NATO expansion as an expansion of a hostile military bloc eager to surround Russia on all sides,” he said during his last visit, in February.

But Russian Defense Minister Sergei B. Ivanov remains unconvinced. At a news conference Monday in Moscow, he reiterated that such statements contain a basic contradiction.

“NATO constantly is stating that this military-political organization poses no threat to Russia. But then the question naturally arises: If there is no threat coming from Russia, then for what reason does this organization need to enlarge itself?”

While there is no practical consequence to holding the assembly’s spring session in the Lithuanian capital, the symbolism is alarming to Russia, said Andrei V. Kortunov, president of the Russian Science Foundation, a political think tank in Moscow. “This will add more weight to the existing suspicions that the Baltic countries may join NATO in the very nearest future,” he said.

The meeting in Vilnius has been an emotional shot in the arm to Lithuania, a country of 3.6 million people where almost all political factions support joining NATO.

Williams, speaking by telephone from Vilnius, said hundreds of people had gathered in front of the meeting venue, a contemporary arts center, in an emotion-tinged demonstration that recalled the mass public displays in favor of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

The NATO meeting is “of tremendous importance,” Lithuania’s parliament speaker, Arturas Paulauskas, said in a telephone interview. He called it a chance to show off Lithuania’s achievements since recovering its independence from Moscow. “I am sure this will significantly help us to move closer to the desired goal of joining NATO.”

Russia was upset in 1999 when former Warsaw Pact members Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were allowed to join NATO. But it is even more worried about the consequences of admitting the three Baltic states, which are hoping for a formal invitation to join NATO next year.

With Poland as a member, NATO has a shared border with Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave. But the admission of the Baltic states would move NATO’s frontier about 400 miles to the northeast, brushing up against the main part of Russia--and only about 100 miles from the country’s unofficial second capital, St. Petersburg.

Chances that at least one of the three Baltic countries will get an invitation to join NATO are believed to have improved with the election of President George W. Bush. Several prominent Republican Party figures have spoken out in favor of expansion, and Bush is on record as saying, “No part of Europe will be excluded [from NATO] because of history or geography.”

A NATO summit scheduled for Prague, the Czech capital, in November 2002 is expected to determine whether to invite up to nine states into the alliance. The hopefuls, all formerly run by Communists, are Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.

A draft resolution prepared for the Vilnius meeting endorses NATO expansion, asserting that the admission of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic proved a positive step toward “enhancing peace and stability in the entire Euro-Atlantic region.”

Besides NATO enlargement, the assembly--whose meetings began Sunday and continue through Thursday--is to discuss European security, the formation of a European Union “rapid-reaction” military force, Bush’s U.S. missile defense concept, and the political and military situation in the Balkans.

The assembly is made up of 214 parliament members from the 19 member countries and 73 others from the 17 “associated” states. Established in 1955, the assembly has no formal status within NATO’s structures but is a forum for lawmakers to build consensus on topics related to the alliance and European security.

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Sergei L. Loiko and Yakov Ryzhak of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.