President Yeltsin's offer to disarm nuclear weapons targeted at NATO countries gave him a dramatic publicity initiative yesterday at the signing ceremony of the agreement between Russia and NATO on the latter's eastward expansion in Europe. His apparently spontaneous decision to announce this latest proposal took the entire Elysee Palace by surprise, pushed the Russian President to centre stage and relegated Presidents Chirac and Clinton, for the day at least, to secondary roles. It was, in short, an extraordinary publicity coup, but the proposal under closer examination may not be as generous as it seems. It should be remembered that an agreement between Russia and the United States to cease aiming missiles at each other has been in existence since 1993.
The proposal made yesterday by Mr Yeltsin appeared to extend `de-targeting' unilaterally to the other member-states of the western alliance, without any specific agreement or treaty; an extremely generous proposal indeed. But an agreement, a treaty, does exist in the form of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty known as Start-2. This treaty envisages a planned and agreed scaling down of weapons of mass destruction and it has already been ratified by the US Congress. The Russian parliament, particularly the State Duma, its communist-led lower house, has, however, failed to ratify the treaty and Mr Yeltsin's unilateral announcement yesterday seems likely to confirm the Duma in its opposition.
An important figure in this scenario is the flamboyant right-wing extremist Mr Vladimir Zhirinovsky whose public opposition to many of Mr Yeltsin's proposals has been vehement in the extreme. When it comes down to voting in the Duma, however, Mr Zhirinovsky has frequently done a political somersault to support Mr Yeltsin's proposals despite all previous indications to the contrary. His opponents have accused him of selling the votes of his Duma bloc to the highest bidder but no proof of this has emerged.
Mr Zhirinovsky is, therefore, a key figure in the Russian and international nuclear debate. His votes along with those of the genuinely pro-Yeltsin and pro-democracy forces in the Russian parliament - could ensure the ratification of Start-2 which Mr Yeltsin promised to Mr Clinton at their summit meeting in Helsinki in March. The question now arises as to whether Mr Yeltsin's impromptu announcement was a true gesture of goodwill or a hint that not all may be going well in his attempts to persuade his parliament to ratify Start-2.
For its part, NATO has been careful to point out that it would not be accepted as a replacement for the Start-2 treaty which is regarded as one of the essential building blocks for the new structures of international security. Russia may not be regarded as a world super power but it still has a vast nuclear arsenal, with long-range missiles equipped with 6,500 warheads and an additional 10,000 nuclear warheads for battlefield use. An agreed, comprehensive and, supervised scaling down of this arsenal as scheduled in, Start-2 would provide a far greater measure of security than the type of ad hoc, if encouraging, proposal made yesterday by Mr Yeltsin.