RUSSIA: The First Aid Summit

Clinton made a down payment on Yeltsin's reforms, but long-term success will tax the West's generosity

THE SETTING WAS MAJESTIC: A city of gleaming skyscrapers backed by magnificent snow-capped mountains, a Mediterranean-style villa perched on a splendid promontory overlooking the northern Pacific. The results of the weekend summit meeting in Vancouver, Canada, were inevitably less grandiose. Indeed, Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin hardly aimed at any readily measurable result. Dollars and cents may have been the language of discourse, but the effect was largely symbolic: to demonstrate that Yeltsin still has firm American support in his hour of trial, that Clinton is not quite an uninterested novice in foreign affairs and that the West really does...

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