Azerbaijan Accuses Russia of Meddling : Diplomacy: President Aliyev heads for talks with Clinton, seeking support for his new nation.

BAKU, Azerbaijan — Moscow has stepped up its meddling in Azerbaijani affairs, Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliyev complained as he flew off to Washington for a meeting with President Clinton where he hopes to win U.S. support for his new nation.

Aliyev, the 71-year-old former member of the Soviet Politburo, accused Russia of interfering in an Azerbaijani oil deal, helping opposition leaders escape from jail in Baku, the capital, and demanding that its own troops patrol Azerbaijan’s borders.

Most Russian troops pulled out of Azerbaijan in mid-1993, leaving only a missile-tracking and electronic-warfare base. Russian border guards now patrol nearly every other border in the former Soviet Union, but Aliyev said that the Turkish-speaking Muslim republic will refuse to allow Russian soldiers to be garrisoned along its frontier with Iran.

“Russia wants to put soldiers back on our borders, but we will protect them,” the president said in an interview Friday. “We will not give up on our independence.”

Aliyev hinted that he expects a favorable reception at his meeting with Clinton, which is scheduled for Monday. A cease-fire with Armenia in the war over the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh has been holding for four months, and both sides say prospects for peace are brighter than they have been at any time during the six-year conflict.

Moreover, last week Azerbaijan signed an $8-billion oil exploration and production agreement with a consortium of Western companies. Four U.S. oil companies, including Los Angeles-based Unocal, will take part in the deal.

Diplomats say more active Western support for Azerbaijan would be natural now.

“The balance has changed very fundamentally. It’s very positive,” one Western envoy said. “Azerbaijan has taken a major step to tie itself to the West, to cast its economic future in the direction of change toward a market economy.”

The West has done little over the past year as Russia has regained influence in its former Caucasian territories, particularly Azerbaijan and Georgia.

Russia had objected to the Azerbaijan offshore oil deal, saying the landlocked Caspian Sea’s oil deposits belong to all the bordering nations. The deal went through after the Russian national oil company, Lukoil, was given a 10% share, but on the day of the signing the Russian Foreign Ministry repeated its objections.

One day after the oil contract was signed, four leading opponents of Aliyev’s regime broke out of a prison on the sixth floor of Azerbaijan’s local KGB headquarters in what appeared to be an unusually well-planned escape.

Aliyev was so unnerved that he cleared all the country’s television channels for a live speech to rally his nation of 7 million people.

“Those responsible were the same outside forces that helped Armenia in the war against Azerbaijan,” the president said.

“Of course he meant it was Russia,” a senior Azerbaijani official said. “They still control people in the KGB, even the army here. The Russians were very unhappy about the oil contract being signed.

“Russia is trying to re-create the Soviet Union,” the official said. “We are under huge pressure. If the West does not resist, they will find a new confrontation. The Americans will find themselves with a strong nuclear Russia once again.”

The official said he suspects Russia will seek to arm or support loyalists of the four escapees--one of whom is the rebel leader of Azerbaijan’s ethnic Talysh region--to undermine the Baku government. He said Russia has used such tactics before in attempts to regain control in Georgia, Tajikistan and the breakaway southern Russian republic of Chechnya.