Diplomacy Zeroing In On Moscow

Cool welcome for Chirac

He had promised to make tough points and ask even tougher questions. For their part, his Soviet hosts had made it clear that they held him accountable for "frictions" in Franco-Soviet relations. Thus it came as no surprise last week that French Premier Jacques Chirac's visit to Moscow got off to a sharply contentious start.

At a Kremlin banquet, Chirac congratulated his host, Premier Nikolai Ryzhkov, and an unexpected guest, General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, on their new policies toward political prisoners and Soviet Jews, but added, "You cannot ignore that from our point of view there is a long way to...

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