U.S. Finds Way to Criticize Russian Acts in Chechnya : Diplomacy: It accuses Kremlin of violating its obligations under European security accord.

WASHINGTON — Seeking to distance itself from President Boris N. Yeltsin and the bloody war in Chechnya, the Clinton Administration on Wednesday accused Russia of violating standards of the Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe in its fumbling campaign to prevent the tiny republic from seceding.

Although President Clinton last week expressed concern over rising civilian casualties in Chechnya and urged Yeltsin to change his military tactics there, Wednesday’s criticism was Washington’s first suggestion that Russia was violating its obligations under OSCE, of which Russia is a member.

The Chechnya fighting has presented U.S. policy-makers with a difficult problem. The Administration continues to regard Yeltsin as the best hope of preserving democratic reform in Russia. It also worries about instability if the Russian Federation begins to disintegrate. Yet Washington finds the brutality of Russian military operations--especially the toll on civilians--increasingly hard to stomach.

By invoking OSCE guidelines, the Administration is able to get around its earlier reluctance to criticize Russian military action in a region that Washington considers to be part of Russia.

Unlike most other provisions of international law, OSCE obligations apply to the internal affairs as well as the foreign policy of member states.

Officials confirmed last week that the Administration is re-evaluating its previously unqualified support for Yeltsin in response to the Chechen debacle.

Sam Brown, a veteran of the U.S. anti-war movement a quarter of a century ago who is now U.S. ambassador to the OSCE, will press the issue today during a meeting in Vienna of the organization’s permanent council.

Secretary of State Warren Christopher plans to bring up the Chechen crisis when he meets next week in Geneva with Russian Foreign Minister Andrei A. Kozyrev.

State Department spokeswoman Christine Shelly said Russia’s military offensive violates several OSCE rules, including a military code of conduct signed by Yeltsin, Clinton and other chiefs of government last month in Budapest, Hungary.

The code calls on member states to seek to end hostilities, to try to create favorable conditions for political solutions to conflicts, to cooperate in support of humanitarian assistance and to alleviate suffering among civilian populations.

Shelly also said the Russian army did not notify the organization of its troop movements as it is required to do under the guidelines.

“After considerable review of the information available to date, we have concluded that Russia has not fulfilled all of its commitments under the OSCE and the Helsinki Final Act,” Shelly said.

The recently renamed organization began in 1974 in Helsinki as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, a Cold War-era forum intended to bridge the East-West gap.

By establishing human rights standards by which member countries could be judged, the group contributed to the political pressures that ultimately brought down the Communist governments of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Although the organization has no enforcement powers, its guidelines carry strong moral authority.

Ironically, Russia has been trying to strengthen the security structure of the organization in an effort to head off expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Moscow reasons that a strengthened OSCE could provide the same security guarantees that Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia hope to obtain by joining NATO.

The United States has resisted the Russian OSCE plan because it wants to maintain NATO as Europe’s most important military-political alliance.