“Can you imagine, if I give you this person’s name, and his head were to be cut off the next day?” he said. “But yes, we do have people in Qaddafi’s camp.”

In Tripoli, the Russian move prompted a testy response from the government, which has repeatedly rejected demands for Colonel Qaddafi to quit, saying that it is up to “the Libyan people,” not foreign powers or the rebels, to decide the role Colonel Qaddafi will play in the country’s future. The deputy foreign minister, Khalid Kaim, said at a news conference that Libya expected solidarity from Russia after 40 years of close commercial and political links, not a deal made in France that aligned Moscow with Western powers in their attempt to unseat Colonel Qaddafi.

“We don’t think that Russia will stray into the position in which it will be siding with NATO,” he said. Then, as if to snub President Medvedev’s offer for Russia to act as a diplomatic intermediary, he said that the Qaddafi government would not, in any case, accept any diplomatic approach from Moscow unless the Russians chose to approach Libya through a body that has long been a Qaddafi ally, the African Union.

In the face of the strong restatement of demands for Colonel Qaddafi to go that have come in recent days from President Obama, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, the Tripoli government appeared to have circled its diplomatic wagons, and to be holding out for a lifeline from the African nations Colonel Qaddafi has courted, and supported financially.

The African Union, which offered its own peace plan at the outset of the conflict, only to have it abruptly rejected by the rebels, met this week in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, and agreed to resume its peace efforts this weekend with a visit to Tripoli by President Jacob Zuma of South Africa, who was expected to meet with Colonel Qaddafi.

That meeting would mark a break in Colonel Qaddafi’s elusive behavior since the NATO bombing strikes began two months ago.

From the start, Russia spoke against the NATO military operation in Libya, though like China, it chose not to use its veto power in the United Nations Security Council to block the authorization of Resolution 1973. As the Western campaign mounted, Russian officials charged that the allies were exceeding their mandate, and more hawkish commentators argued that Mr. Medvedev should have taken a harder line.