…BUT REACH TENTATIVE AGREEMENT ON CFE.

Grachev and Perry were said to have reached "a meeting of the minds" on amending the treaty limiting conventional forces in Europe (CFE) to allow Russia to keep more military equipment in some border areas. Moscow insists on being allowed higher quotas of combat hardware than those set by the treaty and greater flexibility in moving and basing troops along its northern and southern flanks. Last month, NATO offered a compromise that would permit Moscow to concentrate larger amounts of military equipment in flank areas in the Caucasus and opposite Norway. President Boris Yeltsin reportedly presented counterproposals in his meeting last week with President Clinton in New York, rejecting some of the exemptions that NATO had offered and adding some others. Perry yesterday responded by putting forward a compromise map of exempted districts that Grachev said would be acceptable. Perry declined to detail the map, but said the Russians plan to present it next month at talks in Vienna among the treaty’s 30 signatories. Grachev partially detailed the map yesterday to Moscow journalists, saying that the US had agreed to exempting the Krasnodar, Stavropol, Rostov, and Volgograd regions from treaty limits. (3) This would leave Russia free to bring combat hardware from those regions to the Caucasus.

Russian Oil Project in Cuba.