PRESIDENT Yeltsin has demanded urgent detailed information about an alleged coup plot involving the Russian national security chief, Gen Alexander Lebed, his office said yesterday.
The allegations had been made against Gen Lebed earlier in the day by Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov. Gen Lebed himself flatly denied the claim.
"The president is very concerned after Kulikov's intervention and has called on Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin and the interior minister to urgently present him with detailed information on this subject," the president's press office said in a statement.
On Wednesday, Mr Kulikov told journalists Gen Lebed had planned a "mutiny" spearheaded by a 50,000 strong force called the Russian Legion he wanted set up under his command.
"Lebed has taken a definite decision to go forward, by force, without waiting for the presidential elections of 2000," Mr Kulikov said. "This is a serious warning. Let everyone do what they have to."
The battle between the two men began with an air of melodrama in August when Gen Lebed said that Russia was not big enough for both of them.
Two months later, the clash threatens to destabilise a country already shaken by the ill health of President Yeltsin.
In August, Gen Lebed accused Mr Kulikov directly of dragging out the conflict in Chechnya and challenged President Yeltsin via a news conference to choose between them.
"Now I address Russian President Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin: you will have to make a difficult choice. Only one must stay - Lebed or Kulikov ... Otherwise, everything "will deteriorate into a fight with a man obsessed with a Napoleon complex."
The 50 year old Kulikov, whose calm manner and glasses belie his reputation as a hardliner, refused to rise to the bait, confining his return fire to criticism of the peace deal Gen Lebed signed with Chechnya's rebels in late August.
Gen Lebed, a former paratroop general denies the coup allegations and has threatened to sue Mr Kulikov for symbolic damages of one rouble. President Yeltsin, known to favour a strategy of balancing the various forces around him, has used Mr Rulikov as a foil to Gen Lebed, whose open presidential ambitions and obvious popularity to make him a man who must be treated with care.
Tanks have appeared in Moscow twice in just over five years, once, in August 1991 when hardliners tried to oust the Soviet leader Mr Mikhail Gorbachev, and again in October 1993 when President Yeltsin tried to remove a group of hardliners occupying the White House government building.