Western governments are trying to limit the political damage from investigations into alleged Russian laundering of international financial aid rather than questioning their support for Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
As details emerge of separate probes into the alleged recycling of Russian funds through the Bank of New York and into reported links between Yeltsin's own entourage and a Swiss construction company, Western leaders have sought to avoid blame rather than publicly rethink their policy.
"Like any politician in trouble, their main reaction is to cover their backs," said Rodric Braithwaite, who was British ambassador to Moscow in 1988-1992.
"The fact is that everybody has known for several years, inasmuch as such clandestine activities can be known, that vast chunks of money were being exported illegally from Russia and ending up in accounts in Switzerland and elsewhere.
"For people to stagger around now saying `good gracious' is rather absurd," Braithwaite, now an adviser on Russia to Deutsche Bank, told Reuters in an interview.
Western officials acknowledge they turned a blind eye to corruption and widely assumed abuses of financial aid because Yeltsin pursued a largely pro-Western foreign policy and was a bulwark against the return of the Communist Party to power.
Defending past aid, they cite other concerns such as keeping the former Soviet nuclear arsenal under control and preventing a destabilizing breakup of Russia.
Many contend that The Economist magazine's description of Russia as "the world's leading kleptocracy" is exaggerated and argue that despite the warts of crime and corruption, Russia is still on the road to becoming a free-market democracy.
The political fallout seems most damaging in the US, where Al Gore's Republican opponents have seized on his close ties with Russia's leaders and his support for aid to Moscow as ammunition against his presidential bid.
But the probes could also embarrass European leaders such as French President Jacques Chirac, who advocated continued financial aid to Moscow and lent strong personal support to Yeltsin despite growing reports of corruption, money laundering and economic mismanagement.
"It is hard to see how US President (Bill) Clinton, Gore and (Deputy Secretary of State) Strobe Talbott can escape blame for their past policy," said Anatol Lieven, an expert on Russia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Western aid might have been justified on political grounds in 1995-1996, when there was a gen-uine fear of the Communist Party returning to power through the ballot box, he said.
But the political credit of the Clinton administration became too bound up with Yeltsin personally, and Washington was "blinded by its own rhetoric that the free market and privatization had to work everywhere," Lieven said.
Lieven said disclosures about the laundering probes were not unwelcome to officials in Western foreign ministries who wanted their governments to distance themselves from the ailing Yeltsin and prepare to work with a new leadership in Russia.
Regulatory authorities in the United States and Britain are now investigating suspicions that Russian mobsters, businesses and senior officials may have funnelled more than US$15 billion from Russia via the respected Bank of New York. Some newspapers say the money may have included International Monetary Fund aid.
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