Interfax in English

May 22, 1997

1341 GMT 22 May 97

MOSCOW, May 22 (Interfax) -- Communist Party leader Gennadiy Zyuganov said that by dismissing them on Thursday [22 May] President Boris Yeltsin punished Defense Minister Igor Rodionov and general staff chief Viktor Samsonov for what he had none other than himself to blame. Yeltsin has "ruined" Russia's armed forces, Zyuganov told Interfax. The president, under the constitution military commander-in-chief, "has himself left the army without pay, without new weapons, without apartments.

It's effectively he who has got everything into a mess in the army. He doesn't want to answer for this and now is laying the blame at somebody's else's door," he said. "Rodionov has been in office for only a few months. You can't ruin such an army over such a period... As for Yeltsin, he has ruined all the most efficient units which were in East Germany. I served there and I knew what that half-million-strong group was like," he said. "Yeltsin's only style is to pound his fist and make threats. He's been doing nothing else lately," Zyuganov said. "One can't carry out reforms by shouting and making noise. If you have no strategy, if you have no suggestions to make, if you haven't had any normal ideas for six years, it's you who must be the first to be taken to task."

Zyuganov also blasted Defense Council chief Yuriy Baturin as "an American representative in the Kremlin, who is doing everything to finish off the army."

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Johnson's Russia List

24 May 1997

djohnson@cdi.org