Summit Scorecard

The developments: President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev signed a historic arms control treaty and launched a joint move to prod Israel into attending a Middle East peace conference. But the two continued to disagree over the next steps to take on arms control.

Cooperation on the Middle East is an example of the new partnership between the superpowers, which Bush has been trying to foster.

But initial Israeli comments on the U.S.-Soviet move were skeptical, and the move to call a peace conference may yet derail.

Outlook: Secretary of State James A. Baker III will travel to Jerusalem in yet another effort to persuade Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to accept an invitation to a peace conference. If Baker succeeds, the conference is likely to take place in October.

On tap today: Bush will leave Moscow and head for Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, where he will address leaders of the republic, many of whom have been pushing for greater independence from Gorbachev’s government.

Bush will walk a fine line in the Ukraine as he tries to urge the republics and the central government to resolve their differences without getting involved in the argument over how the Soviet Union should be restructured.

Another sensitive subject is the Holocaust memorial at Babi Yar, which Bush will visit today. The site has been a flash point over lingering Soviet anti-Semitism.

Quotable: We are talking about removing barriers which are connected with decisions taken during the Cold War, during the arms race. This is a different time. Different winds are blowing.”

--President Gorbachev

Remembrances: Although past American Presidents generally have stayed only in Moscow when they visited the Soviet Union, Bush’s trip to Kiev has some precedents. Franklin D. Roosevelt, for example, met with Josef V. Stalin during World War II in the Crimean city of Yalta. And President Richard M. Nixon traveled to Leningrad, Minsk and Yalta during visits in 1972 and 1974. The current moves toward independence for some of the Soviet Union’s 15 republics make Bush’s trip far more symbolically important.