Washington, March 18, 2010: With the United States and Russia still haggling over the fine print of a long-delayed arms control pact, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton left Washington on Wednesday for high-level meetings in Moscow, as the Obama administration tried to push the talks across the finish line.

Mrs. Clinton planned to meet President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia and the foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, who expressed confidence last week that a deal could be reached by the end of the month.

That would allow President Obama to present the agreement, which would make deep cuts in the nuclear arsenals of both countries, at an international summit on nuclear non-proliferation next month in Washington.

“Certainly this is a moment when we’ve made a lot of progress and we certainly hope to make more, and the secretary’s involvement is extremely important,” the undersecretary of state for political affairs, William J. Burns, said to reporters traveling on Mrs. Clinton’s plane.

“We want to move ahead to finish the agreement,” he said.

In Moscow, Mrs. Clinton will also meet with leaders from the European Union and the United Nations, as well as Russia, to discuss the fallout from a sharp conflict between the United States and Israel over the Israeli government’s announcement of a housing plan for Jews in East Jerusalem last week.

Although an arms deal could theoretically be announced while Mrs. Clinton is in Moscow, the months of tortuous negotiations have made administration officials extremely leery of predicting the end of a process they had once claimed would be wrapped up by the end of last year.

In recent weeks, Mr. Obama has thrust himself into the negotiations, speaking twice by phone with Mr. Medvedev in the last three weeks. In the first call, Mr. Obama was surprised to hear the Russian president raise several fresh hurdles, including the revised American plan for a missile-defense system, which Mr. Obama believed had been settled by negotiators in Geneva.

Mr. Obama held a second, more upbeat, call with Mr. Medvedev last Saturday, and the White House hopes that Mrs. Clinton’s meeting with the Russian president at his dacha will build on that momentum.

The agreement, which would replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty of 1991, or Start, would be a symbol of the new relationship Mr. Obama is trying to forge with Russia. It would reduce deployed strategic warheads and delivery systems by at least 25 percent.

Citing another sign of better ties between the countries, officials said that 30 percent of supplies for American troops in Afghanistan were now being shipped through Russian territory, either by airplane or train.

Mrs. Clinton is also expected to seek a public show of support from Russia for tougher United Nations sanctions against Iran, which could help the administration press its case with a resistant China.

Russia has been more open to a harder line toward Tehran since the Iranian government rebuffed a proposal to ship much of its lightly-enriched uranium to Russia and France to be enriched to a higher level to fuel a research reactor in Tehran that produces medical isotopes.

(News Agency)