RUSSIA - March 16 - Iran Deal Debated.

The newspaper Sevodnya says of the Iran arms deal: "The patron of international terrorism has been promised increased sales of arms and broader co-operation in the nuclear energy field". (Putin met with Khatami on March 12 and then left for a four-day vacation. But Putin cut short his trip on March 16 to return to Moscow in the aftermath of the hijacking of a Russian airliner to Saudi Arabia). Izvestia, under a headline "Dangerous Deal", says "the Khatami presidency is a liberal facade for the fundamentalist regime". It says the real power in Iran "is held not by the liberal Khatami but by the ayatollahs, who take quite a different view of the country's future", adding that Putin should not be surprised if in five to ten years "a group of Islamic terrorists or separatists armed with military hardware that Moscow had just sent to Tehran" show up in Russia or on its borders.

(The debate over Putin's rush to capture the Iranian market for Russia's beleaguered arms and energy industries is not yet as intense as the American reaction to it - indeed, many Russians support closer ties with Iran. But a sense of danger is growing based in part on the fear that Iran's moderates will lose power, putting Russian weapons in the hands of hardliners who might point them at Central Asia or use them to incite Russia's Muslim population. The conflict in Chechnya has intensified this concern. The sense of danger is also based on the fear that Russia's deteriorating relations with Washington will only get worse as the Bush administration pressures Iran over its support for terrorism, and Tehran's efforts to develop long-range ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction). "Russia today has a major problem of image deterioration", says Andrei Kozyrev, foreign minister under Boris Yeltsin. "We are losing in terms of these demonising cliches, that every Russian businessman is a thief", or that "Russia is reverting to the old Soviet style or anti-Western behaviour. This reality requires that we in government, Parliament and business should understand that we have an image problem that should be addressed and that requires a cautious approach in foreign policy". He says while Russia has no other choice but to do business with Iran, it should do so in a manner that addresses Western concerns about the spread of dangerous weapons technologies. "I would be extremely cautious in doing any weapons business with Iran since that would put Russia on particularly thin ice".

Nonetheless, Putin's policy on Iran does have its supporters. "I think that Russia, the United States and the European Union have a very big stake in the future of Iran and we need many channels of communications", says Andrei Kokoshin, a national security adviser under Yeltsin. He characterised Khatami's visit as "an opportunity for the involvement of Iran in world political affairs and world economic affairs that could provide an alternative to the policies of the conservatives in Iran". Kokoshin says he hopes the US and Russia could collaborate in drawing Iran out of its isolation. He also rejects the notion that the sale of conventional Russian weapons is a significant factor in Moscow's relations with Tehran. (In January, Grigori Yavlinsky, who heads the liberal Yabloko Party, wrote an open letter that he thought Putin should send to Bush. In it, Yavlinsky said Iran represents a "very important arms market for Russia. Such trade does not threaten our security. We do not intend to make concessions on this issue. This is a very important source of revenue, and a possibility of developing technology". It is not known whether Putin has taken this advice and conveyed these sentiments to Bush, but the Russian leader chose this week to send his closest adviser on national security affairs, Sergei Ivanov, to Washington. In meetings at the White House and State Department, Ivanov was to try to convince Bush's aides that Russia is as concerned about the potential danger from Iran as anyone. Ivanov likes to say that Russians live much closer to Iran than anyone in the West and therefore Moscow has no interest in assisting Iran's ballistic missile programme or its secret efforts to develop nuclear weapons. He also likes to note that Russia is providing Iran with a nuclear power plant at Bushehr on the Gulf coast that is almost identical to a nuclear plant that the US and South Korea are building in North Korea).