THE COST OF THE WAR.

President Yeltsin’s former press secretary, Vyacheslav Kostikov, maintained on the pages of Argumenty i Fakty (November 13 issue) that Russia is spending US$160 million a month on the war in Chechnya. In an interview appearing on the November 25 in Grani.ru, Sergei Arutyunov, head of the Department of the Peoples of the Caucasus of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, remarked, “[f]rom several of my acquaintances I have heard that this war is costing about 10 percent of the Russian budget.” Arutyunov predicted that the Chechen conflict would end “somewhere around 2020.”