Defense Chief Says He’ll Cut Russian Troops

Rebuffed by the president and Parliament in an appeal for a bigger budget, Defense Minister Pavel S. Grachev said Monday that he will cut Russia’s armed forces from 2.2 million to 1.9 million personnel by Oct. 1.

The planned retrenchment would mean an army with 200,000 fewer members than the force that Grachev defined six months ago as the minimum Russia needed to guarantee its security.

Grachev reported the planned cuts in brief remarks to the Russian news agency Interfax. He said they would hit officers as well as soldiers and that 270 out of 2,050 positions on the armed forces’ general staff would be eliminated.

The defense minister, an army general, suffered two setbacks last week in his public campaign to raise the 1994 military budget from $19 billion (37 trillion rubles) to what he called a “subsistence level” of $28.2 billion. As it stands, he said, the budget can cover only the salaries of service people and other personnel.

In response to the intense lobbying, the Duma, or lower house of Parliament, voted Wednesday to raise spending on the armed forces to $20.5 billion--a defeat for Grachev. Two days later, President Boris N. Yeltsin sided with the Duma and rebuked his minister in public.

“The army should be more active in cutting the number of servicemen,” Yeltsin said in a nationally televised news conference.

The president offered the military an extra $512 million in off-budget funds, such as revenue from the sale of jet fighters abroad. But he rejected a wholesale increase.

Spending on the armed forces accounts for about 20% of the budget, but critics of the military say hidden defense outlays bring the total to more than half of all government spending.