President Clinton offered Boris Yeltsin a $1 billion aid package Saturday and promised to “mobilize the world” behind Russia’s economic and political reforms.
Their much anticipated summit, six days after the Russian president narrowly escaped impeachment by the Congress of People’s Deputies, is intended as a highly visible American show of support for Yeltsin, who seeks a nationwide vote of confidence April 25.
“The Communists want to take revenge, to take us back to the past,” Yeltsin said, before his meeting with Clinton. But with international support, he said, “We will indeed . . . bring the reform process to completion.”
But Yeltsin himself raised concerns that Western financial aid, so badly needed to soften the blow of his economic measures, could backfire if it provides ammunition for his nationalist and Communist opponents who depict him as too beholden to the West.
“It is important that Yeltsin not be misperceived as simply someone who is coming here asking for aid,” said a U.S. official. “We don’t look at this as charity but as an investment, not only in the future of Russia but in the future of the United States.”
Unlike all its Cold War predecessors, the Vancouver summit is about alms rather than arms, as Yeltsin appealed for American aid to support democracy and help Russia make the painful transition to a market-oriented economy.
Clinton and Yeltsin met one-on-one, joined only by interpreters and notetakers, Saturday afternoon to discuss the unsettled political situation in Moscow. Later, they joined senior advisers for a working dinner at which Clinton presented his roughly $1 billion aid package.
Clinton stressed to Yeltsin that this money, from unspent funds previously appropriated by Congress, will be available quickly to promote reforms at the grass-roots level.
And Clinton, after consulting with all the other leaders of the Group of Seven major industrialized nations, assured Yeltsin that far more aid-perhaps as much as $30 billion-would be available if Russia implements fundamental economic reforms, such as curtailing inflation and shutting inefficient state-run enterprises.
In his weekly radio address to the nation, Clinton compared his effort to mobilize international support for Russia to the one mounted by President George Bush to assemble a coalition to confront Iraq in the Persian Gulf war.
Speaking later to reporters, Clinton said he understands concerns that the money may be misspent and that future political events might undermine the effectiveness of assistance. While impossible to predict what will happen in Moscow, he said, “I think that the kinds of things we propose to do are likely to have lasting and tangible impact, and the way we propose to do it will minimize the chance that the money will be misspent.”
The last time the presidents of the United States and Russia got together for a summit, in Moscow on New Year’s weekend, it was for Yeltsin and Bush to sign a landmark treaty to reduce by two-thirds each side’s arsenal of nuclear weapons. This time, the leaders of the old free world and the newly freed one are getting around to arms control almost as an afterthought.
Mostly, Clinton and Yeltsin are talking Saturday and Sunday about Russia’s faltering economic and political reforms and what, if anything, the U.S. can do to bolster them. For the first time, an American president is bringing to the summit his secretary of the treasury, Lloyd Bentsen.
Yeltsin arrived first Saturday morning directly from Moscow. He stood at attention alone in a downpour, waving off an offer of an umbrella, as a military band played the national anthems of Russia and Canada. Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney stood nearby.
The rain had let up when Clinton arrived two hours later from Portland, Ore., on his first trip outside the U.S. since becoming president. Both presidents joined Mulroney, their host, for lunch before holding their private talks.
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Yeltsin and Clinton “seem to be getting along like a house afire, and I think they’ll do very well,” Mulroney said after the luncheon.
The two populist leaders, born a generation and a world apart, are keenly aware that whatever personal rapport they might begin to create could be very short-lived.
On April 25, Yeltsin will face a nationwide referendum in which Russians will be asked to decide whether they still back him and his wrenching economic reforms.
If Yeltsin loses, he has said, he will step down. And the hard-liners who would likely replace him could bring an abrupt end to Russia’s fragile democratic reforms.
Clinton’s task is persuading the American people that they have an urgent stake in that battle-something that will be difficult to do, if the results of a Gallup poll published Friday accurately reflect the national mood. Eighty percent of respondents opposed increasing aid to Russia.
“We lack the specter of a menacing adversary to spur our efforts to engage other nations,” Clinton told the American Society of Newspaper Editors in a speech Thursday night. “Now, not fear, but vision must drive our investment and our engagement in this new world . . . . We must act now, not out of charity, but because it is a wise investment, building on what has already been done and looking to our own future.”
Clinton’s aides have stressed that the new American aid package is not simply intended to boost Yeltsin.
And American officials also said they were determined to avoid last year’s unhappy experience, when Western governments pledged $24 billion to Russia, but half of it turned out to be credits and little cash was actually disbursed. The confusion left many Russians feeling swindled.
It is important that the U.S. and other nations now break the pattern of “making large promises that we could not deliver,” a senior American official said Saturday.
The details of the American plan are to be announced by Clinton at the end of the summit Sunday.
But officials said the plan being presented to Yeltsin includes such things as housing construction for Russian military officers returning from the Baltic states, food and medical assistance, a fund to assist Russian entrepreneurs, expanded American volunteer programs and money to help repair the nation’s decrepit oil and gas production facilities.
All of the programs are designed to demonstrate to Russians in concrete ways that the West is interested in alleviating some of their economic suffering, officials said.
On the eve of the summit, Russia’s Western creditors announced an urgently needed debt-rescheduling agreement that will save Russia more than $15 billion in loan payments this year.
Clinton planned to emphasize to Yeltsin that Russia cannot expect large sums of long-term Western aid unless the government stops printing worthless rubles and brings skyrocketing inflation under control.
Starkly underlining how different the focus of this summit is from past meetings, Yeltsin has brought with him many of his top economic advisers-and not a single high-ranking military official.
There is a very good reason why Yeltsin and Clinton are not dwelling on the nuclear issues that transfixed the world during every previous superpower summit between the United States and the former Soviet Union.
If they did, they would only get depressed. The grandiose nuclear arms reductions treaties negotiated by former U.S. President George Bush are now stalled like rush-hour traffic in the gridlock of Russia’s complex power struggle.