Russia and the United States were at loggerheads yesterday over US threats to launch military strikes against Iraq, with Moscow warning that an attack would affect Russia's "vital interests".
In a blunt warning the Russian Defence Minister, Mr Igor Sergeyev, told his visiting US counterpart, Mr William Cohen, that strikes against Baghdad would also hurt US-Russian military co-operation.
Mr Cohen, who was visibly taken aback by the sharpness of Mr Sergeyev's attack, had arrived in Moscow late on Wednesday for two days of talks.
"The crisis, unfortunately, affects Russia's vital interests and those of other states in the region," Mr Sergeyev said in Moscow's harshest comment on the crisis since President Yeltsin last week warned that US policy "could lead to a world war".
Mr Cohen later tried to play down differences, saying: "We each have a better understanding of our respective positions [although] we continue to disagree in terms of the method of achieving what are shared ultimate goals."
Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that UN inspectors in Iraq found evidence of a 1995 agreement by the Russian government to sell Baghdad sophisticated equipment that could be used to develop biological weapons.
In Moscow, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mr Gennady Tarasov, denied the report. "Russia has never made any deals with Iraq that would violate international sanctions," he said.
The Post said UN inspectors in the autumn of 1997 seized a confidential document prepared by Iraqi officials that described lengthy negotiations leading to a deal worth millions of dollars.
However, Britain's Channel Four television news claimed last night the US had helped Iraq develop its chemical and biological weapons programmes in the 1980s while Britain sold Baghdad the antidote to nerve gas as late as March 1992. The programme said it had found US intelligence documents which showed 14 consignments of biological materials were exported from the US to Iraq between 1985 and 1989.
Tehran yesterday urged the UN Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, to visit Iraq to look for ways of ending the impasse, the Iranian news agency IRNA said. It said the Iranian Foreign Minister, Mr Kamal Kharrazi, made the request in a phone conversation with Mr Annan on Wednesday.
In a separate dispatch, the IRNA agency rejected a London Times article which claimed senior Iraqi and Iranian intelligence officials had met recently to forge a pact in the face of the growing threat of military action. It was referring to an article saying Iran and Iraq had set up a direct channel of communication between their intelligence services. In Washington, the US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, said yesterday that compromise proposals over Iraq would get nowhere and that President Saddam Hussein's only option was to allow free UN access to suspected weapons sites.
"Saddam does not have a menu of choices. He has one," she said at a Congressional hearing. In Baghdad, the Iraqi Vice-President, Mr Taha Yassin Ramadan, told a Gulf television station that a diplomatic solution had "reached a stage of maturity, thanks to the intensification of contacts. It has become clearer than last week."
Meanwhile, Washington continued its military build-up, with F16 fighter jets and B-52 bombers leaving the US for the Gulf.