YELTSIN APPOINTS ANOTHER CIVILIAN TO RUSSIA’S DEFENSE MINISTRY.

President Boris Yeltsin yesterday appointed Nikolai Mikhailov to succeed Andrei Kokoshin as a Russian first deputy minister of defense. For the past year, Mikhailov had been serving as one of the deputy secretaries of the Defense Council. Like Kokoshin he is a civilian and a graduate of the Bauman Moscow State Technical University. However, unlike Kokoshin, he cannot be described as a defense intellectual. Instead, he has had a professional career in defense electronics. In the early 1970s he was the chief engineer of the Gomel radar enterprise in Minsk. He then went to work at Vympel — a producer of air-to-air missiles — ultimately becoming the company’s president. During last year’s presidential election campaign he was one of 13 bankers and industrialists who published the "Appeal of the 13" urging the candidates to forge a political compromise to avoid splitting the country.

In another personnel change involving the military establishment, it seems that the Defense Ministry was not interested in the services of Gen. Aleksandr Kotelkin. When recently relieved of his post as head of the Rosvooruzhenie arms export company, Kotelkin was put at the disposal of the military. However, he was named yesterday as a first deputy minister in Russia’s Foreign Economic Relations and Trade Ministry. There he is expected to deal with cooperation in military technology. (Russian media, September 11)

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