YELTSIN’S INDEPENDENCE DAY MESSAGE: RUSSIA IS BACK.

In a wide-ranging interview in the June 9 Izvestiya, Russian president Boris Yeltsin said that as of this independence day (June 12) Russia will have recovered much that she had earlier lost both at home and abroad. He said that Russia would manage to convert the G-7 into the G-8, that the Chechen war was almost over and that Moscow’s victory there guaranteed the preservation of a “single Russia, and that the economy was set to take off. Coy about his own plans for reelection, Yeltsin nonetheless gave broad hints that he expected Russians, especially in the provinces to back Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin’s “Russia is Our Home” bloc.

Grachev a No-Show at NATO Session.