RUSSIAN DEFENSE CHIEF PROMISES MILITARY REFORMS

By Andrei Khalip

June 18, 1997

MOSCOW (Reuter) - Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev declared war on waste Wednesday in committing himself to a long campaign that will trim and modernize Russia's armed forces.

After briefing Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Sergeyev gave few details, but both men stressed the financial constraints.

But the head of the air force, in separate remarks, lifted the veil slightly by saying as much as a third of his corps would go and suggesting the cuts could be similar elsewhere.

``The financial burden of maintaining the armed forces must be cut while cash must be freed for a powerful drive to develop the most promising technologies,'' Sergeyev told NTV television.

Boris Yeltsin fired Sergeyev's predecessor last month for failing to make progress on the president's goal of an all-volunteer force by the turn of the century and for ``whining'' too often about the army's need for more money.

Chernomyrdin was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying the planned reforms were inextricably linked to the nation's finances: ``That's essential, so that we don't get to the point where we take decisions and next day realize we have no funds.''

His first deputy, economic reform chief Anatoly Chubais, heads a committee in charge of financing the modernization of the vast, underfunded and demoralized Cold War-era army while Chernomyrdin himself heads a team looking at defense reforms.

There has been resistance from the high command to the civilian government's efforts to cut back, although Sergeyev, former head of the strategic missile command, told Yeltsin earlier this month that reforms now had broad backing.

The head of the air force, Gen. Pyotr Deinekin, was quoted by Interfax as saying the air force would be cut by more than a third by 2001, in line with similar reductions across the board.

Deinekin also mentioned a plan to cut the air force by 30,000 men a year until 2001. But an air force spokesman said the figures must be wrong as it would add up to cutting the corps, the elite of the Russian forces, by more than half.

Russia's armed forces are calculated at some 1.8 million men but even the generals concede they are not sure of their true size, making it hard to assess progress on previous plans to cut 200,000 men from the ranks this year.

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Johnson's Russia List

19 June 1997

djohnson@cdi.org