WASHINGTON D.C. -- American policies toward Russia are expected to become one of the first critical battlegrounds in Washington's new balance of power between President Bill Clinton and the triumphant Republican majorities in Congress.


According to administration sources, America's NATO allies are bracing for almost immediate foreign policy disputes over Bosnia, Eastern Europe and policy toward Russia when the new Republican majorities take over the House and Senate foreign relations subcommittees in January.


The Republicans support the swift extension of full NATO membership to the East European countries of Poland, Hungary and the Czech and Slovak republics, by 1996 or 1998 at the latest. They then envisage extending NATO membership to the Baltic states, and also call for Clinton to "affirm at the highest level U.S. support for Ukrainian independence."


Matched with hostility to any further U.S. financial support for Russia, a personal crusade of Senator Jesse Helms, the new Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the prospect of NATO being extended to the Russian frontier threatens a serious period of tension between the United States and Moscow.


In Moscow, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry said that no change in relations with the United States was expected following the Republican victory.


"We do not expect any dramatic changes. We assume that Russia's partnership with the United States is not affected by internal changes," Mikhail Demurin told a news conference, Reuters reported.


In Washington, however, the mood was less complacent. White House officials, expecting sharp foreign policy confrontations in the future, are scrambling to beat the Republicans' arrival by announcing next week a new agreement under which Ukraine will formally sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.


But Clinton's hopes of welcoming President Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine to Washington with a major new aid package now hinges on Republican readiness to vote the funds.


Although Clinton appealed yesterday for a bipartisan foreign policy in which domestic arguments would stop "at the water's edge," the jubilant Republican leadership is determined to cut back the internationalist policies of the Clinton administration.


One of the less noticed features of the Republicans' election manifesto, the 10-point "Contract with America," was Senator Bob Dole's demand that U.S. troops never come under UN command, and that the United States should not take part in any UN peacekeeping operation unless there had first been a debate and a vote in Congress.


That would effectively bar any future operations like the military takeover of Haiti to restore President Bertrand Aristide's democratic rule, or another humanitarian mission like Somalia. Ironically, some 1,900 U.S. Marines began deploying for Somalia on Friday, on a temporary mission to guard the withdrawal of other UN forces from the impoverished African country.


Helms views the United Nations with undisguised contempt. He is deeply suspicious of all foreign aid, supports Taiwan over the Republic of China, wants to block the transfer of the Panama Canal to the Republic of Panama, and speculates openly whether the Russians have truly changed their ways and have made an irreversible shift to democratic values.


The first clash is likely to come over Bosnia. Bob Dole, the Republican leader in the Senate, is one of the most passionate advocates of lifting the arms embargo on former Yugoslavia to give the Bosnian Moslems free access to heavy weapons, a policy that has widespread support among the Republicans. The Clinton administration's earlier commitment to provide over 20,000 ground troops to implement any Bosnian peace settlement is now effectively dead.


Clinton departs this weekend for the Philippines and Indonesia, for the second annual summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Conference, the first of a series of foreign trips in which he will look increasingly like that foreign policy president George Bush, whom he defeated at the polls in 1992. Over the next few months, Clinton plans to visit South Africa, Haiti, Europe, Moscow and possibly China, in addition to hosting next month's pan-American summit in Miami.


"President Clinton's problem is that he will be looking for foreign policy victories, but they will require either money or Congressional support, and usually both," Charles William Maynes, editor of the quarterly Foreign Policy, said Friday.


"The U.S. has usually bought its foreign policy successes in the past. Take the Middle East. In 1969, Israel and Egypt took 1 percent of U.S. foreign aid. But as the price of the Camp David peace agreement, they then got 80 percent of our military aid and 50 percent of our bilateral aid. It is not easy to see how that kind of money could be available for a Syrian peace agreement, or for investing in Russian democracy," Maynes added. "The Republican majority in Congress can really tie the president's hands."