Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, August 5, 1993                   TAG: 9308050241
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

U.S. TO INTERCEDE IN EX-SOVIET SPATS

The U.S. plan is to help broker an end to the disputes before they destabilize the Moscow regime of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, foment wider ethnic or religious conflict in Turkey and southern Asia or provide a pretext for aggressive military intervention by Russian forces outside Russia's borders, the officials said.

The initiative comes at a time when armed conflicts are raging in three of the former Soviet republics - Georgia, Tajikistan and Azerbaijan - while ethnic or separatist tensions are simmering in the Baltics, Moldova and Russia itself. Dissidents in North Ossetia, a strife-torn area in Russia's Caucasus mountains, last weekend assassinated the senior Russian official overseeing a state of emergency there.

In some of these conflicts, Russian military forces deployed nearby have taken sides or been "stirring up trouble," a senior U.S. official said. He added that the U.S. intelligence community believes the troops' aim is either to prolong their deployment, protect some of the 25 million ethnic Russians who live outside of Russia or help Moscow reassert control over territory it once held.

The administration is uncertain if the actions are directed by anti-reformist military officers on the general staff in Moscow or simply reflect the uncoordinated actions of renegade commanders in the field. But few U.S. experts expect that Yeltsin, who is conserving his political power for a coming battle over the drafting of a new Russian constitution, will be able on his own to put a stop to the meddling by Russia's military.

Russian foreign ministry officials have signaled their own alarm in recent months by quietly seeking U.S. and United Nations support for future deployments of international peacekeeping forces in countries on Russia's periphery that are beset by crises.

As part of the new U.S. strategy to quiet these conflicts, Secretary of State Warren Christopher has appointed the deputy chief of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, James Collins, to be a coordinator for regional affairs under Ambassador-at-Large Strobe Talbott in the State Department's Office of Newly Independent States.

Collins' principal activity, according to a senior official, will be "diplomatic arbitrage" - or mediation - among the parties to these disputes, so long as they welcome it. His leverage, the official added, lies partly in the fact that many of the partisans have better relations with Washington than with each other or with Moscow.