The US Defence Secretary William Cohen is in Moscow for talks on nuclear disarmament, but the agenda is likely to be side-tracked by differences over policy towards Iraq.

Russian analyst Dimitri Trenin says Moscow remains opposed to military action against Iraq (2'-54")

Mr Cohen, who arrived from a six-nation Gulf tour on Wednesday evening, had a breakfast meeting with Andrei Kokoshin, the Secretary of the Defence Council, a policy advisory body.

In a last-minute addition to his programme, Mr Cohen will meet on Friday the Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov, the mastermind of Moscow's Iraq policy.

Dimitri Trenin, an analyst with the Canada Institute in Moscow, told the BBC that Mr Cohen was unlikely to find little change in Russia's opposition to military action against Iraq.

He said that if the US did attack Iraq it would cause "some pretty bad fallout as far as the whole Russian/American relationship is concerned."

The Russian President Boris Yeltsin has sent a high-ranking envoy to Baghdad in an attempt to negotiate a compromise between the United Nations and Saddam Hussein in the dispute over weapons inspections.

However, Washington has rebuffed Baghdad's latest offer - that it opens eight disputed sites to UN weapons inspectors for 60 days.

President Yeltsin recently said a military strike on Iraq could cause a world war

Mr Cohen arrived in Moscow as The Washington Post reported that UN weapons inspectors had discovered a document last year showing Russia agreed in 1996 to sell equipment to Iraq that could be used to manufacture biological weapons.

However, Russian officials in Moscow told the Interfax news agency that no such deliveries had taken place.

Iraq is not the official reason for Mr Cohen's trip to Moscow. He is due to meet leading members of the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, which is holding up ratification of the START-2 treaty signed by Russia and the US in 1993.

Under the START-2 accord, the United States and Russia will cut the number of nuclear warheads they deploy by up to two-thirds from about 6,000 each to no more than 3,500 each by 2007.

The US Senate has ratified it but the State Duma has held back out of concern that the Americans are building new missile defence systems in violation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty. Washington says it is not doing this.
 

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