Russia, U.S. Disagree Over Monitors

The top diplomats from the United States and Russia clashed openly Tuesday about the role of international election monitors, adding to new strains in ties between the former Cold War rivals.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei V. Lavrov differed sharply on the issue in remarks at a gathering here of the 55-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The meeting unfolded against the backdrop of a political conflict in Ukraine triggered by allegations of fraud in last month’s presidential election runoff.

OSCE election monitors helped document irregularities that resulted in a now-discredited victory for the pro-Moscow candidate, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich. Speaking to other foreign ministers at the meeting Tuesday, Lavrov all but accused the organization of using monitors to meddle in the affairs of nations that were once part of the Soviet Union.

“In the absence of objective criteria, election monitoring becomes an instrument for political manipulation and a factor for destabilization in a whole range of instances,” Lavrov said.

Russian delegates to the OSCE gathering also reportedly blocked a proposed statement from Ukraine’s foreign minister that would have endorsed his country’s Supreme Court ruling last week. The court nullified the results of the vote and ordered a new election Dec. 26.

“There was no explanation” of why the Russians opposed the statement, a senior State Department official said.

By contrast, Powell praised the OSCE’s election-monitoring activities and urged member states to provide additional money and staffing for monitors to observe the revote. State Department officials at the meeting said they expected to gain approval to send “about double” the approximately 500 monitors who observed the disputed Nov. 21 runoff.

Powell also rejected an accusation made by Lavrov that the OSCE practiced a “double standard” in which nations on the western side of Europe’s old East-West divide hold newly democratic countries from the former Soviet bloc to higher electoral standards and treat them as second-class members.

“I categorically disagree,” Powell told delegates.

Powell went on to chastise Moscow for its failure to complete the withdrawal of up to 1,500 Russian troops from Moldova or to agree to a withdrawal date for an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 troops stationed in Georgia, another former Soviet republic.

In 1999, then-Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin pledged at an OSCE summit to withdraw his country’s forces from Moldova by 2002 and to reduce troop levels in Georgia.

After stating their differences publicly, Lavrov and Powell met privately on the fringes of the meeting for 30 minutes. Aides said the talks focused on Ukraine and, as one U.S. official noted, “a number of issues where we don’t necessarily see eye to eye.”

By late Tuesday, both men were attempting to contain any diplomatic fallout from their public remarks. Powell told a student group in Sofia that American relations with Moscow remained good, and Lavrov issued a statement through the Foreign Ministry that the U.S.-Russian partnership was strong enough to permit an open discussion of differences.

The exchange earlier Tuesday is part of a broader clash of interests developing between the two countries as Russian President Vladimir V. Putin has moved to muffle dissent at home and reassert his nation’s influence in some former Soviet republics.

In his remarks Tuesday, Powell expressed concern about what he called “developments in Russia ... affecting freedom of the press and the rule of law.”

At a news conference Monday during an official visit to Turkey, Putin accused Western countries of working in the name of democracy to destabilize politics in former Soviet republics. On Tuesday, he took a swipe at U.S. efforts to hold elections in strife-torn Iraq by Jan. 31, news services reported, commenting that he couldn’t imagine how voting could be organized under current conditions there.

Russia’s differences with the U.S. and other Western countries are especially visible within the OSCE, an intergovernmental organization that deals with economic, political and military issues. Increasingly frustrated by the organization’s emphasis on human rights, Moscow has begun to question the need for the group’s existence.

Lavrov warned Tuesday that the organization risked stumbling into an identity crisis, saying that internal divisions were eroding its effectiveness.

“The things that united us now threaten to divide us,” he said. “There are new lines of division on our continent.”