GEN Alexander Lebed's plan for peace in Chechnya moved a small step further towards realisation yesterday when it received cautious backing from the Russian Prime Minister, Mr Viktor Chernomyrdin.
However, Gen Lebed and Mr Chernomyrdin appeared to have different interpretations of the degree to which the Prime Minister favoured the plan.
Mr Chernomyrdin's office, quoted by Interfax news agency, said he told Gen Lebed, who signed the accord with Chechen separatist leaders, that "Russia's territorial integrity" must remain a cornerstone of any peace settlement.
But earlier Gen Lebed told a television interviewer that Mr Chernomyrdin had "fully approved" the text of an accord he signed with the separatists last Saturday.
Gen Lebed said on television he "felt alone on the field of battle" in his efforts to achieve peace in Chechnya. The nearly 21 month old war had cost 80,000 lives, more than three quarters of them civilian, he said.
The Chechen president, Mr Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, gave his backing to the plan over the weekend. But doubts about the Lebed achievement were also being expressed by the pro Moscow Chechen leader, Mr Doku Zavgayev, who stands to lose whatever power be bad, and by the commander of Russia's Interior Ministry forces on the ground, Gen Anatoly Shkirko.
Gen Shkirko's superior, the Interior Minister, Gen Anatoly Kulikov, is no friend of Gen Lebed. Gen Lebed blamed him for the continuation of the war and tried unsuccessfully to have him dismissed from his post.
Later yesterday Mr Chernomyrdin had a two hour meeting with President Yeltsin at his rest home outside Moscow. An apparent part of the meeting was shown on Russian television last night.
It was Mr Yeltsin's first television appearance since August 22nd and followed renewed speculation about the 65 year old president's health.
He was shown from a distance for just a few seconds, sitting in an armchair dressed in jeans and a cardigan. He looked tanned and a little thinner than before.
The official ITAR TASS news agency yesterday quoted an unnamed senior Kremlin source as saying that Mr Yeltsin had been undergoing tests and "preventive treatment". Up to now the official version had been that Mr Yeltsin had been suffering from a sore throat followed by tiredness after his election campaign.
No details of the type of treatment were given, but Mr Yeltsin, who was expected to speak by telephone to Gen Lebed late last night was also preparing for a meeting at Zavidovo with the German Chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl, who is his strongest supporter in the West.
At the weekend the Washington Post reported that recent television footage of Mr Yeltsin shown in Russia had been doctored heavily, with pictures of doctors in white coats airbrushed out of some of the shots.
"As long as Chechnya is flooded with arms, stability in the region is unachievable," Gen Shkirko told ITAR TASS last night.
