YELTSIN RUINING ARMY, RUSSIA FACES BREAKUP--GENERAL

By Gareth Jones

June 24, 1997

MOSCOW (Reuter) - A leading military expert accused President Boris Yeltsin of Tuesday of ruining Russia's armed forces and said the country risked losing all its territory east of the Urals as a result.

In an open address to Yeltsin, Gen. Lev Rokhlin, who heads the parliamentary defense committee, said the president and commander-in-chief had ``done nothing over the past six years for the country's military security.''

``You have condemned the armed forces to eventual ruin,'' said Rokhlin, who won wide respect for his role in Russia's ill-fated military campaign in breakaway Chechnya.

There was no immediate reply from the Kremlin to his attack.

Rokhlin sits as a deputy in the State Duma lower house of parliament for the usually pro-government Our Home is Russia party headed by Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin.

But he has become increasingly critical of the Kremlin's military policy.

Moscow's once proud military machine has decayed from chronic money shortages since the 1991 collapse of Soviet communism. Officers often go months without pay and underfed conscripts have been reduced to begging in the streets. Suicides, thefts and bullying of young recruits by senior officers have become commonplace.

Political wrangling has delayed urgent reforms that would cut bureaucratic waste, target spending on priority areas and over the long term transform the ramshackle conscript-based forces into a leaner, modern professional army.

Echoing an old nationalist obsession, Rokhlin said Washington and its allies aimed to break Russia up into petty fiefdoms easily dictated to from outside.

But the danger was not confined to the West, he added.

China's ascendancy in the Asian-Pacific region posed a long-term threat to Russia's sparsely populated, resource-rich eastern territories, he said.

``With your (Yeltsin's) attitude to national defense in the first 20 years of the next millenium Russia could lose its Far East region and Siberia right up to the Urals.''

The Ural mountains separate European and Asian Russia.

His statement was also addressed to officers, whom he urged to fight government plans to scale down the military.

Yeltsin has said he wants the armed forces to be cut to 1.2 million from about 1.8 million men now.

Even generals concede they are not sure of the exact troop figure now, making it hard to assess progress on previous plans to cut 200,000 men this year.

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Johnson's Russia List

25 June 1997

djohnson@cdi.org