The head of Russia's Air Force, Gen Pyotr Deinekin, offered his resignation yesterday, one day after being criticised in parliament over the air crash in Siberia in which scores of people died.
An air force spokesman said Gen Deinekin wanted to step down because he turns 60 on Sunday, the standard retirement age in Russia's armed forces.
His future now lies in the hands of President Yeltsin, who is commander in chief of Russia's armed forces and can reject or approve his resignation request.
Mr Yeltsin's decision is clearly complicated by Saturday's air disaster in which a military cargo plane crashed into an apartment building in the Siberian city of Irkutsk.
Gen Deinekin, who holds various distinguished military awards, asked to be put on reserve after retirement.
On Wednesday, a maverick general and parliamentary deputy, Gen Lev Rokhlin, criticised Gen Deinekin over a reportedly big fall in safety standards in the air force. Speaking in the Duma, Gen Rokhlin - a strident critic of the government's plans to reform the armed forces - called on deputies to set up a commission charged with impeaching Mr Yeltsin over the state of Russia's air force.
Gen Rokhlin, who heads the Duma's defence committee, said that under Gen Deinekin too many air force planes were being used for commercial purposes. The Antonov-124 which crashed on Saturday had been transporting two fighter jets earmarked for export to Vietnam.
Gen Deinekin became chief of the Air Force in 1992 and his period at the helm has coincided with painful financial cutbacks. Last August he said that the Air Force and air defence troops would be cut by 160,000 men from a combined strength of 340,000.
At the time Gen Deinekin said one of the main problems facing his forces was a lack of aviation fuel. On Tuesday, the head of Russia's Federal Security Service, Gen Nikolai Kovalyov, said the focus of the investigation into the Siberian crash was the presence of summer aviation fuel in the plane's tanks. The Antonov, one of the world's biggest aircraft, was carrying 60 tonnes of summer fuel in temperatures of 25 Celsius below zero.