RUSSIA's constant power struggle looks set to continue following the Kremlin's admission that President Yeltsin's recovery from heart surgery and double pneumonia will be a slow one and there would be no speedy, return to the Kremlin. Some insiders believe it will be six month before he can expect to recover fully.
In the course of that period a number of important meetings have been arranged including a summit between Mr Yeltsin and President Clinton next month in Helsinki at which the crucial issue of NATO's eastward expansion is due to be discussed.
In the meantime, a virtual electoral campaign for the presidency between the Mayor of Moscow, Mr Yuri Luzhkov, and the sacked security chief, Gen Alexander Lebed, appears to be in full swing.
The current issue is Chechnya where the former guerrilla leader, Mr Aslan Maskhadov, is due to be sworn in as regional president later today. Gen Lebed is expected to make a dramatic appearance at the inauguration ceremony to remind the Russian electorate that he was the man who ended a war which cost the lives of tens of thousands of innocent civilians.
Not to be outdone, Mr Luzhkov, departing from his usual municipal duties has declared that Chechnya should be given full independence, a policy which hardly seems consistent with his calls for the Crimean peninsula to be taken, from Ukrainian rule and handed to Russia.
Gen Lebed's latest ally, the former KGB general, Gen Alexander Korzhakov, who won the Duma by-election in the industrial city of Tula south of Moscow at the weekend, hinted strongly yesterday that he was preparing himself for a massive attack on Mr Yeltsin's chief of staff, Mr Anatoly Chubais, in the near future.
In an interview in Russia's most respected newspaper, Izvestiya, Gen Korzhakov accused the Yeltsin administration of being "impotent", adding that "many people [in the Kremlin] have a lot to fear". He had, he said, not gone out of his way to collect compromising information in order to blackmail individual members of the Mr Yeltsin's administration. A lot of such information, however, had been brought to him in his official capacity. "A lot of this has remained in my head," he said.
There is little doubt that Gen Korzhakov's main target will be Mr Chubais, who is already under attack in the Duma over earnings of $300,000 obtained for giving lectures in 1996.
Mr Chubais, who handled Russia's privatisation campaign is one of the most unpopular men in the country, hated by communists and detested by the general public which sees him as having handed over state property to old party apparatchiks. The coming weeks promise to be controversial to say the least.
. A summit next month in Helsinki between President Clinton and Mr Yeltsin could prove an historic step to post-Cold War security for Europe, the US Ambassador to Finland, Mr Derek Shearer, said yesterday.
