Yeltsin Say He Will Fire Foreign Minister, Fight Nato Expansion Russian Sends Cold War-Style Message As Summit Approaches

Pumping up the volume before his summit meeting with President Clinton next week, President Boris Yeltsin sounded off Thursday against NATO and the United States and even said he would dismiss his foreign minister, Andrei V. Kozyrev, who is often criticized here as too accommodating to the West.

Yeltsin’s performance Thursday carried a touch of the Cold War bravado displayed by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at the United Nations in 1960 - including table-pounding (though with his fist, not his shoe).

As Western allies seek to work out a Russian role in policing a peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Yeltsin gave no outward signs of compromise. “We will not fight under NATO command,” he said.

But as keen as Yeltsin was to sound tough in Washington, he seemed just as interested in drawing the attention of his critics at home. In an interview with Russian and American reporters, he made several rather startling statements about the December parliamentary elections and the 1996 presidential race.

For one thing, he backed away from the centrist political bloc he helped create, Our House Russia, saying he would treat all non-extremist parties equally and calling this reversal “a slight turn.”

Yeltsin also suggested for the first time that his military invasion of Chechnya in December might have been misguided. “It might have been possible to manage the situation more subtly and with more foresight,” he said somberly. He described the huge loss of life there as “the greatest disappointment of my presidency.”

Yeltsin, who is under intense pressure from nationalist and Communist opposition, said his country would fight NATO expansion in Europe, blamed Western-style capitalism for corruption in Russia and mocked U.S. pressure to reverse Russia’s plans to sell nuclear reactors to Iran.

He said he had made certain that the reactors could not be converted by Iran for military use, then added that Washington’s campaign was secretly aimed at thwarting Russian arm sales.

“Our weapons are powerful and in many respects better than American ones,” the Russian president said with a smirk. “They don’t want us to move gradually ahead and conquer the world market for arms and military hardware.”

Yeltsin, who not along ago was hospitalized for a severe heart problem, appeared robust and even frisky as he met with reporters in a gilded reception room in the Kremlin. Heedless of television cameras recording the scene, he playfully tweaked two secretaries in the back as he walked to his seat.

He was quite in earnest, however, when he paddled away from the pro-government Our House Russia, recently organized by Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. The party, mostly made up of governors and legislators, has fared poorly in recent regional elections.

Yeltsin said Thursday that he did not want to be associated with only one party, but would support all factions except the Communists and extreme-nationalist Liberal-Democratic party.

“I made a slight turn, but I am in no way rejecting Our House Russia,” Yeltsin said. “I am at the same time demonstratively supporting other movements. I must be even with everybody, you see?”

Asked whether he could work with a Communist-dominated parliament if one was elected in December, he said his main goal was to prevent such a thing.

“If the Communists come up with any calls to overthrow the existing regime, well, in such cases, we may go so far as to cancel the registration of such candidates,” he said. “I mean, we must conduct propaganda against the Communists.”

But he added that he did not think the Communists had as much support as suggested by public opinion polls.