PRESIDENT Yeltsin announced a new push to unify Russia and Belarus yesterday, apparently hoping to claw back some political initiative as he spent his sixth day in hospital for pneumonia.
No date was announced for his release from the Central Clinical Hospital, despite earlier statements that the President would be leaving at the beginning of this week. "For now, I cannot confirm that the president will leave tomorrow or the day after," a Kremlin spokesman, Mr Sergei, Yastrzhembsky, said.
There was a concerted effort by the Kremlin to portray Mr Yeltsin as still being active despite the setback to his attempted comeback from multiple heart bypass surgery carried out last November. His calendar, including a planned" visit to the Netherlands in February, has not been changed, the spokesman said.
Mr Yastrzhembsky also said that, although Mr Yeltsin was still banned from receiving working visitors, his condition was "stable and has a positive tendency".
A new plan for increasing ties between Russia and the former Soviet republic of Belarus was unveiled, with Mr Yeltsin suggesting that a referendum could be held on creating unification in "one form or another".
Moscow's links with Belarus are already the closest with any former Soviet republic and reunion is a popular with the large Russian nationalist population.
Moscow and Minsk signed a union treaty on April 2nd, envisaging the creation of supranational leadership bodies, but new measures are necessary to kick start the integration process, Mr Yeltsin was quoted as saying yesterday.
President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus said he welcomed the proposal.
In addition, the Kremlin said Mr Yeltsin had discussed the economy and crime by telephone with the Prime Minister, Mr Viktor Chernomyrdin, yesterday.
On Sunday, he received his first visitors - his family, including his wife Naina, who had also been in hospital with an infection.
However, dispelling the image of Mr Yeltsin as a seriously weakened president will be difficult. Mr Andrei Piontkovsky, analyst at the Centre for Strategic Studies thinktank, described the Belarus proposal as a futile attempt by the Kremlin to recapture the initiative and not a serious idea.
"It's another attempt to try and show the president is still alive. They couldn't come up with anything more clever," Mr Piontkovsky said. "It's already clear he's a lame duck."
Meanwhile, teachers across Russia went on strike to protest at what their union said was about £750 million in unpaid wages. The level of unpaid wages in the state sector reached crisis point several times in 1996, particularly due to strikes by energy workers and miners.
Even when Mr Yeltsin gets out of the Central Clinical Hospital, he will enter a convalescence period of several weeks, probably at his country residence.
. The Council of Europe has suspended Belarus's special guest status, saying its new, legislature had no democratic legitimacy. Mr Leni Fischer, president of the council's parliamentary assembly, said the assembly's bureau took the decision, declaring that Belarus's new constitution did not respect minimum democratic standards.