WHAT THE RUSSIANS SAY
 ABOUT KOSOVO
 SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS
 SERVICE

 Date: Friday, June 18, 1999

 Section: Source: By LINDA SEEBACH

 Scripps Howard News Service

 Memo: For SUNDAY release
 ( Linda Seebach is an editorial writer for the Denver
 Rocky Mountain News.)

 Edition: 

 The United States and NATO came in for plenty of
 criticism during the bombing of Yugoslavia. Our group of
 American journalists, traveling in Russia in early June,
 had the unusual experience of hearing it delivered
 personally by officials of the Russian Foreign Ministry
 and also by Mikhail Gorbachev, last leader of the former
 Soviet Union.

 Their understanding, or misunderstanding, of American
 motives, is illuminating. At the Foreign Ministry, an
 official who asked not to be named described the Kosovo
 campaign as "a performance for an audience of one,"
 namely Russia, which was being put in its place by an
 arrogant United States.

 "The Serbs are our allies, and Orthodox, like Russians,"
 he said. But any country that dared to show friendship to
 Russia could be the next - that is how, he said, the
 military sees matters.

 He raised, only to dismiss, the assertion that NATO acted
 out of humanitarian motives.

 "There is enormous human suffering in Chechnya," he
 said. "Kosovo is not unique. It was selected for other
 reasons."

 Acting as polite guests, none of us contradicted him.
 Because the truth is even more wounding to Russia's
 sense of its place in the world; far from placing Russia at
 the center of NATO's Yugoslavian campaign, the
 American government paid it almost no attention at all.

 Though I think the speaker was wrong, I believe he was
 speaking honestly. Of course we realized that as a group
 of American journalists we were targets of opportunity
 for people with agendas they were eager to advance; but
 if one is going to take the trouble to make up a story,
 why not choose one your intended audience will find
 plausible?

 Furthermore, such a perception helps to explain Russia's
 determination to claim some role for itself in the
 administration of Kosovo once the bombing ended.

 Russian popular sentiment is strongly against the NATO
 bombing, the officials told us, citing public opinion polls.

 "From Gorbachev to just now," said one, "we managed
 to build a trust, but there is not trust any more."

 I'm tempted to say, somewhat cynically, that they'll get
 over it; whatever the relationship between Russia and
 NATO right now, it was born out of 40 years of Cold
 War hostilities based on Mutual Assured Destruction. It's
 hard to see why disagreement over Kosovo should cause
 an irreparable breach, especially since those same polls,
 as others informed us, show no popular support
 whatsoever either for Slobodan Milosevic or for direct
 Russian military involvement if the conflict came to
 fighting on the ground.

 Or, as a staff member at the American embassy said,
 "Watch what they do, not just what they say."

 Though the yellow facade of the embassy in Moscow is
 still spattered with black paint from anti-U.S.
 demonstrations, the visa lines are as long as ever.

 But I was struck by the officials' casual certainty that
 Russian trust in NATO had been genuine and its loss is
 something genuinely to be regretted.

 Gorbachev, too, expressed hope that "the trust that
 enabled us to end the cold war is not squandered," and
 concern about "the wave of anti-Americanism instead of
 pro-American euphoria."

 He criticized the arrogance of American foreign policy
 and endorsed the view that the intervention in Kosovo
 "was to show who was boss."

 NATO is prepared to act elsewhere, he said, and it can
 always find a pretext.

 "I could name a dozen conflicts that were worse, and
 NATO did not intervene," he said.

 He blames what he calls "American triumphalism" on the
 absence of the Soviet Union as a countervailing force.

 Gorbachev is mostly without honor in his own country
 now, despised by the communists because they think he
 betrayed their cause, and by the liberal democrats
 because they think he acted far too slowly to implement
 reforms. He runs a think tank in Moscow, where we
 visited him, and writes a newspaper column.

 Yet I think history will acknowledge him as the pivot on
 which his country's future turned, and critical though he
 was, I'm thrilled that I had the chance to meet him.