Lawmakers Force Yeltsin Aide to Defend Russia’s Policy Toward U.S.

MOSCOW — Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev on Thursday was forced to defend Russia’s policy toward the United States as neither “infantile” nor overly pro-American as lawmakers attacked President Boris N. Yeltsin’s Cabinet for the second day running.

Kozyrev acknowledged, however, that Russian and U.S. policy-makers are still fumbling for a new kind of relationship to replace decades of Cold War confrontation.

The United States is still in the process of accepting Russia as “a normal country,” he said.

Political relations are “truly friendly,” he added, but “we still have to work out our competition on international markets.”

Kozyrev’s rare report to the Supreme Soviet came amid a political flare-up between Yeltsin’s reformist Cabinet and the largely conservative legislature, a battle in which Kozyrev has played an unusually prominent role as one of the president’s staunchest defenders.

Conservatives who are seeking to force the Cabinet to resign complain mainly about the country’s economic woes, but they have also taken to accusing Kozyrev of conducting a foreign policy that hurts Russia’s interests and is skewed in favor of the United States.

Kozyrev tried to reassure lawmakers that under his guidance, Russia is in no danger of becoming “a banana republic, a third-rate country that no one takes any notice of.”

The rumblings continued, however, coming even from acting Speaker Nikolai Ryabov, who declared that “we should put aside this ‘Hurrah, America’ attitude.”