Yeltsin Says He’s Leaving Spa, but Aide Disagrees

MOSCOW — Ailing President Boris N. Yeltsin announced Thursday that he will leave the hospital and be back at work by this morning--but was swiftly contradicted by his spokesman, who said the Russian leader will remain at his out-of-town sanatorium after all.

The 66-year-old Yeltsin has been under medical observation at the Barvikha sanatorium outside Moscow since Dec. 10. Aides said when he was first taken to a hospital that he just had a cold and would be better in 10 to 12 days.

When he was admitted to the sanatorium, financial markets dropped on suspicions that Yeltsin might be suffering from more of the heart trouble that kept him almost continuously off work from July 1996 until February of this year. But his doctors have repeatedly denied that his heart is now malfunctioning.

On Thursday, Yeltsin had clearly had enough of the peace and quiet of the sanatorium. “Tomorrow I am leaving here,” he told journalists waiting to report the results of his morning meeting with Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin. Brief footage on Russian television showed him grinning.

But spokesman Sergei V. Yastrzhembsky and the rest of the Kremlin establishment did not agree. Yastrzhembsky later told the Interfax news agency that the president’s 10 to 12 days were not yet up and that he would still be at Barvikha today.

“Boris Nikolayevich is the kind of man who doesn’t want to stay in bed. He’s itching to be back in action,” Kirill Chernov, duty officer at the presidential press service, explained soothingly. “But his doctors think that the president should not hurry things up. And that was the view voiced by Sergei Yastrzhembsky.

“Right now we don’t have any information about when the president will come back to Moscow,” Chernov added.

Yeltsin’s drinking and heart problems have long been the focus of public attention. But in recent months, the president has earned a new reputation in Russia as a maker of eccentric public comments.

Yastrzhembsky, a smooth career diplomat who became the president’s spokesman last year, has had to step in several times to tone down Yeltsin’s more baffling utterances. Among them were presidential assurances that the nuclear charges were being taken out of Russian warheads; his belief, expressed during a recent visit to Sweden, that Germany and Japan were nuclear powers; and his promise to cut the size of the Russian army by 40% in a year’s time. All were later spun by Yastrzhembsky into a more diplomatic form.

An article in the mass-market newspaper Megapolis-Express on Tuesday suggested tartly that Yeltsin was fast growing senile, and it facetiously reminded its readers that the Kremlin had been run for years in the 1970s and 1980s by Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev “without his ever having regained consciousness.”