Summit Conferences

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin on Wednesday decided to skip the summit of world leaders in France next week to focus on winning the runoff in Russia's hotly contested presidential race. Yeltsin made the announcement just three days after narrowly outpacing Communist candidate Gennady A. Zyuganov in the first round of the Russian election. "The fate of Russia is being decided. . . ," Yeltsin said. "I should go to Lyons, but it is more important [for me] to be here."

Looking to confront the challenge posed by Israel's incoming government, the leaders of Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia called Saturday for a broad summit that could be the most significant such gathering since the Persian Gulf War shattered Arab unity.

President Clinton concluded a three-day summit Thursday that celebrated U.S.-Japanese friendship and strengthened security ties, then flew to St. Petersburg, Russia, for an eight-nation conference on nuclear safeguards. With long-running trade disputes pushed firmly into the background, the Tokyo summit ended in a rosy glow.

As French President Jacques Chirac extolled breakthroughs in nuclear security and East-West relations "due to the personality of Boris Yeltsin," the beaming Russian president was on hand to take the bows. Yeltsin was out of earshot for more subtle praise from President Clinton, who described him as a partner in the quest for prosperity and peace.

The leaders of Russia and the Group of 7 industrial democracies agreed Saturday to push for a ban on nuclear explosions and to work more closely to thwart the smuggling of bomb-making materials by terrorists and rogue states.

When President Clinton and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin sit down with leaders of the world's major democracies later this week in Moscow, the official reason will be for a discussion of Russia's leak-prone atomic weapons stockpile and nuclear power plants. The unofficial--and more pressing--motive is the opportunity the encounter provides for two de facto running mates to bond. The U.S.

The presidents of Russia and the United States agreed Thursday to hold their next summit in March, probably on U.S. soil, a spokesman for Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin said. The date was announced following a 20-minute telephone conversation Thursday between Yeltsin and President Clinton, Itar-Tass news agency reported. The summit, the latest in a series of friendly post-Cold War meetings between the two presidents, will be their first since both won reelection this year.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin expects Chinese President Jiang Zemin to visit Moscow in April for a summit that will set the seal on a new level of relations between the two giant states, the Kremlin said Friday. The visit was agreed upon during a 50-minute meeting between Yeltsin and Chinese Prime Minister Li Peng. It was the Russian leader's first conference with a foreign official since returning to work this week after a heart bypass operation Nov. 5.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization on Tuesday scheduled a summit for July in Madrid to open the Western alliance to at least some of the new democracies that have replaced Communist regimes in Central Europe. At the same time, the foreign ministers of the alliance promised not to deploy nuclear weapons in any new member countries--a step intended to placate Russia's opposition to NATO expansion, which Moscow fears will hem in and isolate it in a redivided Europe.

Foreign and interior ministers of the Group of 7 industrialized powers plus Russia will hold a one-day conference on fighting terrorism July 30 in Paris, the French Foreign Ministry said. The meeting was agreed to at a G-7 summit in Lyons, France, last month, when the world's leading industrial democracies declared the fight against terrorism their "absolute priority" in the wake of a truck bomb that killed 19 U.S. airmen in Saudi Arabia.