Russia and US push on with plan for summit

The US and Russia are pushing ahead with plans for a summit in Moscow this May between Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton, despite mounting American criticism of the war in Chechnya and continuing Russian objections to the entry of the Sovi et Union's former East European satellites into Nato.

After a meeting in Washington with Douglas Hurd, the British Foreign Secretary, the US Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, was last night leaving for two days of talks in Geneva with his Russian opposite number, Andrei Kozyrev, at which the summit meeting could be finalised.

Not surprisingly, enthusiasm is far more discernible in Moscow than in Washington.

Questioned on reports from Russia that Mr Clinton had already received and accepted an invitation for a May summit, the White House said merely that plans for a possible summit would be discussed - a measure of how Russian-American relations have been affected both by the change of power on Capitol Hill and by Moscow's bloody campaign to suppress the Chechen insurrection.

Chechnya will be high on the agenda of Mr Christopher in Geneva and of Mr Clinton in Moscow, assuming that visit does go ahead on schedule. And although Washington still backs Russia's action on the grounds of preserving the country's territorial integrity, pressure from a more hawkish Republican Congress and a public opinion horrified by television images of the carnage around Grozny have produced a notable change of emphasis.

The last thing the Administration wants is for a summit deal to be interpreted as US approval of events in Chechnya. At the weekend Mr Christopher denounced the Russian military campaign as "very harmful ... ill-conceived and ill-executed". He would press Mr Kozyrev to "stop the war as soon as possible". But the US, like Britain, is anxious to prevent the crisis derailing Western relations with Russia across the board. Hence Washington's determination to press on with the search for a closer relationship between Russia and Nato, and a formula reconciling moves towards Nato enlargement with Moscow's fears of confronting a potentially hostile alliance even closer to its western border.

Similar anxieties appear to influence German attitudes to the crisis. Klaus Kinkel, the German Foreign Minister, spoke yesterday of "unacceptable" breaches of human rights in the breakaway republic and appeared to take a tougher line than hitherto. But Mr Kinkel noted that nobody in the West wanted the Russian Federation to collapse. "But can it be right to impose unity and democracy with fire and the sword?"

Mr Kinkel's apparent outspokenness may only be part of a hard-guy-soft-guy routine that has been repeatedly played out by the German government in recent weeks.

It does not necessarily herald a change of line. British officials do not hide their pleasure at Germany's low-key response, which is in sharp contrast to 1991 and 1992, when the wars in Yugoslavia began.

In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung at the weekend, Chancellor Helmut Kohl argued that economic pressure on Russia would be wholly inappropriate. Mr Kohl said that sanctions would only "strengthen the ultra-reactionary forces in Russia".

It is unclear where Mr Kohl finds the evidence for this view, which is not shared by Russian liberals, but which is much peddled by Kremlin spokesmen.

A similar argument was heard in the West four years ago, to justify the reluctance to criticise the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, when tanks killed civilians in Lithuania.