ST. PETERSBURG, Russia -- Leaders of countries opposed to the U.S.-led campaign against Iraq on Friday welcomed the fall of Saddam Hussein but said the United Nations must play a key role in rebuilding the country.

But with the U.S. administration largely unresponsive to their pleas, presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Jacques Chirac of France and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder appeared to leave their future strategy unclear.

The leaders issued no joint statement after a day of talks, arranged in Putin's home town after U.S. and British forces secured control of Baghdad and ousted the Iraqi president.

With reports of Baghdad being pitched into anarchy, Putin urged Washington take urgent steps to give the United Nations a role in post-Saddam Iraq.

"I want to stress again that the situation we are confronting in Iraq must be resolved as quickly as possible in accordance with the UN charter," Putin told a news conference alongside the French and German leaders. "The faster we go along the path as set down by international law, the better it will be. The longer we delay a resolution within the UN framework, the more it will look like a colonial situation."

Putin said the U.S.-led campaign had failed in the original task agreed last November by the international community of determining whether Iraq held banned weapons.

"No one liked the Iraqi regime apart from Saddam Hussein, but this is not the point," he said.

Seizing on a journalist's T-shirt bearing the likeness of Latin American revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara, he said no one had the right to impose alien values on any nation. "We have no intention of dealing in the export of capitalist democratic revolution," he said. "If we proceed to do that, the world will embark on a very dangerous, slippery path of an unending chain of military conflicts."

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has dismissed European calls to assign the UN a major role in rebuilding Iraq. A top Pentagon official suggested the three would best contribute to reconstruction by forgiving debts to any new Iraqi government. --- Multi-Polar World ---

Chirac told reporters the world had rejoiced at Saddam's defeat. But all three leaders, he said, shared a world view enshrining the United Nations as defender of democratic values. "We want the world of tomorrow to be multi-polar. "This vision naturally rules out unilateralism," he sad. "That is why we favor a UN that is respected, recognized and effective." At a conference of Russian and German academics earlier in the day, Putin said Moscow had always known that Saddam's Iraq "does not correspond to democracy and human rights ... but you cannot solve such problems with military means."

Answering a question by a participant, Putin said 80 percent of governments fell short of Western Democratic standards. "Do we go to war with all of them?" he asked ironically. Putin, Chirac and Schroeder, who fought hard at the United Nations to prevent the war against Iraq, gathered in St. Petersburg to uphold the UN's role in Iraq, but also to find ways to mend ties with Washington. (Reuters)