President Boris Yeltsin will meet his Estonian counterpart, Lennart Meri, on Tuesday in what appears to be a final effort to negotiate a Russian troop withdrawal from the Baltic nation by the end of August.


A Kremlin spokesman said Monday that the two men would meet in Moscow at 3 P.M on Tuesday.


Russia has withdrawn the troops it inherited from the Soviet army from Lithuania and has agreed to quit Latvia by Aug. 31.


But agreement to pull its remaining 2,000 men out of Estonia, the third Baltic state, has been stalled by disagreement over the status of ethnic Russians settled there.


Russian and Estonian deputy foreign ministers held two days of talks in Helsinki last week but failed to bridge the gap.


President Bill Clinton, while calling for the troops to go, has publicly urged the Estonians to modify their position on granting Russian-speakers full citizenship rights.


The main problem involves about 9,000 retired army officers who have settled in Estonia, which was annexed by Moscow in 1940. Some Estonians see the officers, many of them in their 40s and 50s, as a potential fifth column.


The Kremlin agreed in principle to pull out by Aug. 31, but the agreement was not firmed up as the two sides failed to agree on the citizenship question.


Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev said in a television interview Sunday that the problem could be resolved as soon as Tallinn agreed to the basic "human demands" of the ex-officers.


"As soon as the Estonians take a decision which moves even slightly towards meeting this elementary condition, the troops will be withdrawn just as they are being withdrawn from other states," Kozyrev told NTV network.


"After all, the pull-out is in our own interests," he added.