New York’s oldest bank could be on the hook for $22.5 billion if the Russian government gets its way. Russia is suing the Bank of New York Mellon under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act for money laundering in Moscow in the 1990s. The case, while potentially a financial disaster for the bank, is also a means for Russia to prosecute a bank that is widely viewed there as a symbol of the chaos and corruption that pervaded the country under President Yeltsin.

The case, one of the first uses of the American RICO statute in a foreign court, comes at a sensitive time for the two countries, as President Bush prepares to voice support for the expansion of the NATO alliance to include Georgia and Ukraine at a summit this week in Bucharest, Romania. Mr. Bush also is expected to meet with President Putin on Sunday in the Russian Black Sea port of Sochi, where

the two leaders will discuss America’s planned Central European missile defense system, which Russia opposes.

The next hearing on the Bank of New York case is set for Monday, and analysts and legal experts say it is likely that the court will rule in Russia’s favor. At issue is a money laundering scheme that ran between 1996 and 1999, when a former vice president at the bank, Lucy Edwards, and her husband, Peter Berlin, both Russian émigrés, moved $7.5 billion to American accounts from Russia via unlicensed wire transfers.

Following a six-year investigation, the Bank of New York, which was founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1784, agreed to pay $38 million in fines, among the largest ever assessed against an American bank for money laundering. The bank “has admitted its criminal conduct and will forfeit $26 million to the United States and pay $12 million in restitution to its victims,” a Department of Justice statement from 2005 said. The couple pleaded guilty to money laundering and were sentenced to six months’ house arrest and ordered to pay $705,000 in fines and compensation.

“The Russians always felt this case was unfair and politically motivated, with just low-level bank employees convicted,” the senior international adviser at law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, Toby Gati, said. “To the Russians, the Bank of New York scandal became the symbol of a rotten Russian system. This is an opportunity for them to put a period at the end of the 1990s and say never again.”

The bank, which last year merged with Pittsburgh-based Mellon Financial Corp., is arguing that the Russians are dressing up a tax case under the RICO statute. It says the plaintiff, Russia’s customs service, is trying to collect taxes that were lost when Russian companies laundered the money through Bank of New York accounts.

“This litigation is about customs duties,” a spokesman for the bank, Jeep Bryant, said in a statement. “If customs duties are owed, the court should be going after the companies that tried to avoid customs duties nearly a decade ago.” According to American law, foreign countries cannot use American courts to collect taxes, so the bank is arguing that if it loses the case in Russia, the Russians would be hard-pressed to collect the award.

“We have strong legal and financial defenses and are well protected,” Mr. Bryant added.

For its part, the Russian government is denying that the case is a tax issue.

“It is certainly innovative to apply RICO in a Russian court,” the Jean Monnet chair in European Union law at Columbia University, George Bermann, said, adding that he thought it was one of the first times the statute had been applied abroad.

The lawyers representing the Russian government aim to collect the $22.5 billion not just by tapping the bank’s assets in America, but also in countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Singapore, where the bank does business and the governments are likely to be more sympathetic.

“We have already identified $22 billion the bank owns in real estate and other assets around the world, and we have hired firms who can get the groundwork laid, so that assuming we win, they can begin immediately enforcing these judgments,” a lawyer for the Russian Federation, Steven Marks, said.

The judgment can also be collected from Russia itself; just last week, the Russian government paid $1.2 billion in fees to the Bank of New York for business conducted there, said Mr. Marks, a partner at Florida-based law firm Podhurst Orseck. “It is laughable to say we won’t collect the award.”

The situation is worrying at least one American banking analyst. The Bank of New York “is acting like this is all just a big political game, but the fact of the matter is, this thing is not going to just go away,” an analyst at Punk Ziegel & Co., Richard Bove, said. He downgraded the stock this week on concern over the Russian suit.

“I spoke to officials at Mellon before the merger, and it was not my sense that they had spent much time on this case, that rather they had accepted Bank of New York’s explanation without doing much of their own due diligence,” Mr. Bove said. If the bank is found liable and forced to pay, “it would have to sell a major portion of the company to pay up.”

Even if Russia is not able to collect any of the money, the government believes it will benefit, the director of Russia studies at the American Enterprise Institute, Leon Aron, said. “The idea behind this is to expose a major Western institution as being in cahoots with corrupt Russian officials from the 1990s,” he said. “Putin wants to project this image that the giant has wakened, that we are not to be trifled with, and this entails coming after a pillar of the Western financial world.”