President Boris Yeltsin`s troubles mounted toward a critical stage Friday as he failed to keep other republics from planning their own armies and as his chief rival, in a blistering counterattack, called his administration of Russia ”criminal.”
In a decision that threatened to cripple the fragile Commonwealth of Independent States and boost tension within the former Soviet army, 5 of the 11 pact members rejected Yeltsin`s plea to maintain the military giant together under a unified command.
”Today two groups of commonwealth members were created-one group agreed to unified control of the armed forces and one group agreed to create its own armed forces,” Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk said following a tumultuous meeting of commonwealth presidents in Minsk, Belarus.
While agreeing unanimously to keep the former Soviet Union`s estimated 27,000 nuclear warheads under the control of a joint command, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Moldova and Uzbekistan would not consent to maintaining the defunct nation`s 3.9 million troops, sailors and air force personnel as a defense mechanism for the entire commonwealth.
Three republics-Ukraine, Moldava and Azerbaijan-said they would move forward with plans to create armies of their own.
Georgia, which is not a commonwealth member, sent an observer to the Minsk summit.
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In another troublesome development for Yeltsin, his vice president and chief political rival, Alexander Rutskoi, called the Russian president`s government a criminal organization and said it should be put on trial for casting the nation into economic hardship.
”A government that cannot feed its people, where schoolchildren are going hungry and old people have to rummage through garbage cans for food-that government is criminal and should be put on trial,” Rutskoi said in a British television interview taped in Moscow.
Yeltsin on Thursday tried to clip Rutskoi`s political wings by naming the decorated Afghanistan war hero to head Russia`s agricultural reform program, a job that has ruined ambitious aspirants to Soviet leadership.
In the interview with Britain`s Independent Television News, Rutskoi did not rule himself out as a future president of the Russian Federation.
The charismatic Rutskoi has embarked on a campaign to garner political support by lashing out at Yeltsin`s economic reforms. Rutskoi`s increasing criticism has placed the air force major general at the center of a movement by conservatives to unseat Yeltsin.
In a remark that appeared bound to increase fears that Russia will not allow its neighbors to become fully independent nations, Rutskoi warned that Moscow would ”turn off (the flow of) oil and stop all other supplies” to states that discriminated against Russians living on their territory.
”Leaders who don`t understand this will have to be educated,” he said in the television interview.
Kravchuk set the tone for the Minsk summit early Friday by declaring before the meeting began that a commonwealth-wide army was not an option.
”United armed forces can exist only in a united state,” he said in Minsk. ”There is no option of preserving united commonwealth forces.”
Kravchuk said that a unified armed force stationed in individual republics ”will spell the end of democracy because the army would stand above all the states.”
Within the former Soviet army, officers appear to strongly favor keeping the once powerful force together. A poll published in the army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda indicated 67 percent of those questioned favored a united commonwealth force operating in tandem with smaller national armies.
An indication of heightening frustration within the armed forces came Thursday when six Russian air crews ”defected” with their bombers from Ukraine to Russia, an act that dramatized the refusal of some former Soviet officers to obey Kravchuk`s call for all military forces to swear allegiance to Ukraine.
Asked if the commonwealth can survive under a scheme allowing individual armies for its 11 members, Kravchuk said:
”The fact that half of the member states want their own armies is of no significance to the commonwealth. I do not want life in the commonwealth to be only linked to armed forces.
”The commonwealth is concerned mainly with economic questions.”
A two-year freeze in the implementation of individual armies as proposed by Belarus would allow the commonwealth time to implement economic programs and sort out territorial disputes.
It also would provide a valuable period to work out a plan for linking various national armed forces into a military pact similar to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.