Useful excerpt from this interview with Thomas Pickering:

The second piece of that was perhaps more important and more productive and that was the bilateral contact between Gore and Chernomyrdin that had to do with dealing with a number of the harder subjects and doing it on their own One of the subjects that they were very helpful in resolving was the sale proposed by Russia to India of a third-stage space maneuvering engine for a satellite program but which would have given India the capacity to develop multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles That was resolved in part because Vice President Gore and his very distinguished assistant Leon Fuerth immediately realized that the Russians were also asking for an increased number of American space launches that we could not provide out of our own system And so we agreed to contract for those on the basis that the contract with India would not go ahead