As U.S. cruise missiles pounded Iraq on Thursday night, President Clinton sent a letter to President Boris Yeltsin acknowledging Russia's fierce opposition to the strikes, but insisting that Washington had no alternative.

Earlier in the day, a U.S. official said, Vice President Gore had telephoned a similar message to the Russian prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov, telling him, "We can't let differences over Iraq hurt our underlying relationship."

Yesterday � after Russia underscored its anger over the airstrikes by recalling its ambassador from Washington for "consultations" � it was Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright's turn, in a telephone conversation with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov.

It was "an extremely useful exchange," State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said.

Clinton and his senior advisers were responding to an outpouring of fury from Russian politicians and officials over the assault on Iraq. Yeltsin called the strikes "simply unacceptable." Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov called them "an act of state terrorism." Vladimir Lukin, a member of the liberal Yabloko faction in parliament, called them "absolutely intolerable."

Yet U.S. officials express confidence that while the bombing of Iraq has been a catalyst for Russian grievances, the criticism will have little real impact on U.S.-Russia relations, which have hit a rough patch over issues more complex than Iraq. As a practical matter, U.S. officials and independent analysts said, Russia has little leverage over Washington and wants a stable relationship.

Albright, for example, came away from her conversation with Ivanov with the message that "the Russians understand the importance of maintaining a broad-based relationship with the United States; that they recognize the importance of having U.S.-Russian relations be a stabilizing factor in the international community, not a destabilizing factor; and that they are going to continue working with us on a wide variety of issues," Rubin said.

"Each side wants to be able to put this behind us after the bombing stops," a senior U.S. official said.

To some extent, the Russian government agreed: "There is no question of any severing of relations either with the U.S.A. or with Great Britain," the other country engaged in pounding Iraq, Yeltsin spokesman Dimitri Yakushkin told the ITAR-TASS news agency. "We must not fall back on the vocabulary of confrontation."

Even as Russian politicians and members of parliament have been flogging the United States over Iraq, Ivanov has been giving interviews this week that stress positive developments in the bilateral relationship on a broad range of issues.

One example of Russia's effort to keep the relationship on an even keel despite the acknowledged differences, U.S. officials said, was Russia's accommodating stance at a meeting in Madrid on Monday of the Peace Implementation Council for Bosnia.

Russia, traditionally pro-Serb, at first objected to U.S.-supported plans to strengthen the Bosnian central government, U.S. officials said. But in the end, as one senior official put it, "once they saw we are on the same basic course, we worked quite cooperatively." Another U.S. official went further, saying the Russians "gave us everything we wanted."

One immediate casualty of the Iraq bombing appears to be the prospect of ratification by the Russian parliament, after more than five years, of the Start II nuclear arms reduction treaty. The Russian government has been pressing hard for ratification, and Ivanov had invited Albright to Moscow next month in the belief that ratification was imminent, but now the vote is likely to be delayed at least until February, officials here and in Moscow said.

Rubin, however, said Albright is planning to visit Russia next month anyway.

"We have developed a very effective working relationship with President Yeltsin, with Foreign Minister Ivanov, with Prime Minister Primakov, and we continue to value that relationship very highly," he said. "That's the reason Secretary Albright will be going to Russia in January. And we will continue to work with the Russians."

Several U.S. officials yesterday minimized the significance of Russia's hostile reaction to the strikes, describing it as a predictable outpouring of long-held and well-known views that the Clinton administration rejects.

"Russian policy on Iraq is incoherent," a senior U.S. official said. "They acknowledge that the threat of force has value, but the use of force is another matter. How credible is the threat of force if it's never used? And what happens when a guy doesn't respond to the threat?"

Russian security strategists are anxious over U.S. decisions in international affairs � including Iraq and the Yugoslav province of Kosovo � that they say circumvent the U.N. Security Council, where its veto gives Russia some leverage. And many Russians are uneasy over U.S. proposals to expand NATO and its sphere of operations into parts of Europe formerly under Russian influence or control.

On the U.S. side, the greatest current source of irritation with Russia is not Iraq but Iran, where Russia is building a nuclear power plant, providing nuclear materials technology and aiding in the development of ballistic missiles, all over U.S. objections.

When new details of this cooperation were published in the Wall Street Journal this week, Rubin said Russia had failed to abide by a promise to limit its nuclear cooperation with Iran to commercial power reactors, and threatened to limit participation by U.S. companies in commercial rocket ventures in Russia "until Russian entities cease cooperation with Iran's ballistic missile program."