By Timothy Heritage

MOSCOW, July 20 (Reuter) - Russian Defence Minister Igor Sergeyev is seeking President Boris Yeltsin's personal intervention to win mid-ranking officers' support for controversial military reforms opposed by many of the top brass.

Sergeyev is due to meet Yeltsin on Monday at the Volzhsky Utyos resort in central Russia, where the president is on holiday, to discuss reforms which include slashing personnel by 500,000 to 1.2 million by the end of 1998.

``I will meet the president and ask him to address the officers and to act as the guarantor of reforms,'' Sergeyev said in comments published in the weekend edition of the Kommersant Daily newspaper.

``The main thing for me is the support of the middle-ranking officers. I will do all I can to get that. Reforms are being carried out for them,'' he said in his remarks, made to Russian editors on Friday.

Sergeyev, who gave no other details of what he planned to tell Yeltsin, said he intended to spend 15 to 20 days with the officers explaining the reforms and listening to their complaints and concerns.

The reforms were outlined in decrees signed last Wednesday by Yeltsin, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

Military experts say lower and middle-ranking officers could bear the brunt of the cutbacks, intended to turn the demoralised armed forces into a smaller but more efficient fighting force.

Sergeyev is under pressure just two months after taking over as defence minister from Igor Rodionov, who was sacked by Yeltsin for failing to carry out reforms.

Rodionov criticised the reform plans on Friday and said they should be based on military and geo-political concerns rather than dictated by economic needs. Another former top military man, ex-Kremlin security adviser Alexander Lebed doubted they would succeed.

Sergeyev defended the reforms, saying immediate and radical steps were needed to prevent the military from collapse.

Despite the need to make cuts and merge some units, he said officers' wages should rise soon.

``It is hard to make promises now, when there is no money, but under the macroeconomic indicators we have we plan to double officers' wages by the year 2001 and increase them by about 2.5 times by the year 2005,'' Sergeyev said.

He said about 100,000 officers were homeless and Rodionov said on Friday some lived in garages, railway carriages, tents or their workplace.

The armed forces were Moscow's pride and joy in Soviet times but are now in disarray. They were humiliated by separatist rebels in Chechnya, many soldiers have not been paid for months, corruption is rife and morale is low.

In the latest sign of ill-discipline, two Interior Ministry servicemen were on the run in southern Russia near the border with Chechnya, armed with a machine-gun and automatic rifle.

Russia's Security Council, a policy-making group of state and military leaders, is due to meet in Moscow on Monday to discuss the situation in the North Ossetia region near Chechnya.

North Ossetia President Akhsarbek Galazov and Ingush President Ruslan Aushev are expected to attend.

Seventeen people were hurt when a bus carrying Ingush refugees was attacked in North Ossetia last week but no one was killed. A conflict between North Ossetia and Ingushetia in 1992 killed about 200 people and caused a huge flow of refugees.

---------------------

Johnson's Russia List

#1065

20 July 1997

djohnson@cdi.org