vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #162 / Business / Reading article...

The litany of problems in the Russian armed forces is no secret to any well-informed observer. Servicemen receive meager salaries late, if at all. Promises of housing for laid-off soldiers and sailors are empty. Much of the Pacific Fleet sits rusting in the city’s harbors. And morale is low from Kaliningrad to Bolshoi Kamen.

Maxwell Jardim, the U.K.’s top officer for Military Resettlement Assistance in Moscow, says what the estimated 1.5 million Russian servicemen need is not empty promises but useful job skills and the promise of employment after leaving the service.

In a recent interview at the Vladivostok-based Pacific Center of Retraining of Servicemen, which is overseeing the navy layoffs, Jardim said, «There is no disagreement anywhere of the inability of the military to capacitate its officers from military life to civilian life.»

The British, for their part, have trained nearly 664 former sailors in Vladivostok in a variety of specialities since September 1996, at a cost of 3.23 billion old rubles. The rate of success for servicemen graduating from the U.K. training programs and finding work with in four months has been noteworthy in other cities, Jardim said. The numbers range from 64 percent in St. Petersburg to 80 Percent in Nizhny Novgorod. Unfortunately, success in Vladivostok has been hard to gauge because of the city’s historical veil of military secrecy, he notes.

One of the biggest obstacles in helping the Russian armed forces to reduce its size and adapt to this era of tight budgets is that no one knows exactly how many men are serving in the military. The estimation of 1.7 million, down from nearly 4 million in the Red Army era, is often given plus or minus 500,000 servicemen.

«Effectively, with all the huge retrenchments, it is impossible for the Ministry of Defense to provide the support it has promised. So many people have been left in limbo,» Jardim notes.

Many of the pledges of support, both financial and material, that have come down have been well-intentioned, but entirely unsuccessful, says Jardim. Defense Minister Igor Sergeev said recently that the military would uphold all its obligations to its servicemen, past and present, in particular by issuing housing vouchers to guarantee apartments.

«Instead of building housing and issuing housing vouchers to its servicemen, if Russia were to pour its money into retraining its servicemen so they can be employed, earn a salary, and rent their own apartment, it would ultimately cost less,» he said.