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MOSCOW, Aug 21, 1999 -- (Agence France Presse) Storm clouds gathered over US-Russian relations Friday after sharp differences emerged on nuclear disarmament and the Kosovo peacekeeping effort, two pillars of cooperation between Moscow and Washington.
Two months to the day after Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton buried the hatchet over the war in Yugoslavia at their Cologne meeting, senior Russian defense and foreign ministry officials made clear there was some lingering frustration with Washington.
General Leonid Ivashov, who heads the department of international cooperation at the defense ministry, railed against NATO's handling of KFOR, the Kosovo peacekeeping mission, and flatly asserted that two days of talks in Moscow on nuclear disarmament were a bust.
"I, contrary to the diplomats, will be frank," Ivashov told a news conference. "There were no results from the negotiations with the American military delegation."
At issue are efforts to get Russian ratification of the 1993 START II Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and to launch negotiations on START III to drastically reduce the number of warheads in the two countries' nuclear arsenal.
Nuclear disarmament, a centerpiece of relations between Moscow and Washington for decades, also serves as an indicator of the state of relations with progress on that front a sure sign of a thaw.
Yeltsin and Clinton agreed in Cologne to try to advance disarmament efforts which have been at a standstill since the signing of START II in 1993 but the Russian military and foreign policy establishment showed during the August 17-18 talks that they were not of the same mindset.
Moscow accused Washington of seeking to link START III to changes to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, as Washington seeks to upgrade its missile defenses.
"We were alarmed by the US attempt to link the signing of START III to changes to the ABM treaty," said Ivashov.
Washington argues that the changes are needed to ward off possible attacks from so-called rogue states like North Korea or Iran, which are allegedly developing long-range missile programs.
On Kosovo, Ivashov and Boris Mayorsky, the foreign ministry's envoy for the former Yugoslavia, suggested that Russia could pull its troops out of KFOR as a form of protest against NATO's handling of the mission.
Moscow maintains that KFOR troops are failing to take action to curb a Serb exodus from Kosovo and deter revenge attacks by returning Albanian refugees on Serb homes.
Russia is also worried by attacks on its peacekeepers that commanders have said were carried out by ethnic Albanian fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), who view the Russian peacekeepers in Kosovo as pro-Serb.
Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev has asked his US counterpart William Cohen to travel to Moscow in September to discuss his complaints over KFOR.
The twin disputes over disarmament and KFOR highlight the long road that lies ahead as US and western leaders seek to repair ties with Russia that were frayed over the Kosovo conflict.
"We are not in conflict but evidently we are not friends," said Viktor Kremenyuk, deputy director of the US-Canada Institute, a Moscow think tank.
Kremenyuk said he expects very little progress to emerge from the second round of disarmament talks to be held in Washington next month because of lingering tensions over the NATO war in Yugoslavia.
"After the whole episode with Kosovo, the Russians feel that militarily they were disregarded and badly treated by NATO. The only way of making the NATO nations realize this is to remind them that Russia is a nuclear power," he said.