MOSCOW -- While demonstrators hurled bottles of ink at the U.S. Embassy here yesterday, the worst crisis between Washington and Moscow since the end of the Cold War found politicians practically lining up to heap abuse and threats on the NATO countries over the strikes against Yugoslavia.

"Let those in the West think whether they are going to sleep with Russian missiles targeted at them," said Viktor Ilyukhin, a communist member of parliament.

The foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, accused the United States of sponsoring Islamic extremism in the heart of Europe by providing military aid to the Albanian Kosovars, who are Muslims. He accused Western European countries of following a "policy of appeasement" toward the United States.

Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Communist faction in parliament, said the attacks had returned Europe to the "times of Hitlerism" and called on Russia to break sanctions against Iraq, Libya and Iran.

The Defense Ministry was reported to be weighing a proposal to re-establish nuclear weapons in neighboring Belarus, though this was later denied.

And the commander of the Far Eastern military district, Col.-Gen. Viktor Chechevatov, said he was prepared to take command of a Russian military unit and lead it to Yugoslavia's rescue. Russian television reported that volunteers across the country were seeking to sign up.

All this gave Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov and President Boris N. Yeltsin a chance to present themselves as cooler heads.

"Russia has a number of extreme measures in reserve," said Yeltsin, "but we have decided against using them so far. We decided to be above that. Up to now we are on a higher moral plane than the Americans."

Primakov argued that the attack by NATO forces lies outside the purview of the organization, represents a "strike against U.N. prestige" and is "an enormous mistake." The sooner a political solution can be reached, he said, the better. But he, too, warned that "if NATO continues its actions, an irrevocable process might begin."

Russia, he said, "has its principles, and we must defend them."

The NATO attacks on Yugoslavia have tapped into the deep reserves of bitterness and paranoia that have been building here since Russia's decline from its superpower status and especially since the debacle of the war in Chechnya. There are unmistakable parallels between Kosovo and Chechnya -- both Muslim regions seeking to break free from larger Orthodox nations. Chechnya bore the brunt of Moscow's fury but wrecked the Russian army anyway. It was a violent, painful humiliation.

Now Russian television is showing signs of weeping Serbians, understandably terrified of the air attacks, holding up religious icons and calling on their Slavic Russian brothers to come to their aid.

Sergei Stepashin, the interior minister who was one of the chief hawks in the Chechen war, yesterday tried to fit NATO into the role Moscow had filled, the aggressive giant doomed to failure. "NATO should have asked us before attacking how we started in Chechnya," he said, "and how it all ended."

Gen. Anatoly Kvashnin, first deputy minister of defense, offered another parallel: Just as the Russians always accused the Chechens of being the masters of organized crime, he asserted yesterday that the Kosovo Liberation Army exists mainly as a means of funneling drugs into Europe.

But what will the Russians do? Ivanov, the foreign minister, has called for a session of the Contact Group of nations, of which Russia is a member, to see whether he can make headway against the air assault.

"We are against any escalation of tensions," he said, "we are against this aggression being escalated into a regional conflict, and we are against it becoming an international conflict. This is not our policy or our choice. That is why we are not going to brandish weapons.

"At the same time, we will not sit on our hands."

When asked about repositioning nuclear weapons into Belarus, Kvashnin said that would be a direct step toward a third world war. "This question is not on the agenda at this point," he said.

At a news conference, Ivanov reacted testily to a question about Russia's request for a new loan from the International Monetary Fund. Moscow is not begging, he said, but sitting down to enter into a business deal.

In fact, though, the head of the IMF, Michel Camdessus, is to meet with Primakov tomorrow, and Russia desperately needs the money. A sharp increase in the ruble supply this month, coupled with fears about the Yugoslav fighting, have pushed the ruble down 20 percent since Monday, from 22.5 to the dollar to 27 at some exchange points last night.

Russia, of course, could manage without the IMF dollars if it had to. But even while angry demonstrators at the U.S. Embassy were demanding to know whether an air assault on Russia was next on Washington's agenda, officials at the Kremlin were calculating how to secure a new $4 billion loan. Perhaps Yeltsin was being literal when he called the NATO attack on Yugoslavia "a gross error that they'll have to pay for."

Pub Date: 3/26/99