RUSSIA-BELARUS UNION: SHORT ON FUNDS BUT BENT ON ENLARGEMENT.

An “extraordinary” session of the Russia-Belarus Union’s Parliamentary Assembly, held yesterday in Moscow, adopted the Union’s 1999 budget in the amount of 800 billion Russian rubles. No deficit is built in, but one may well develop if disbursements fall short during the year, as seems almost likely. Under the Union’s founding documents, its budget exclusively supports joint economic programs, with Russia contributing 65 percent and Belarus 35 percent of the appropriations.

Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, the Russian presidential aspirant, took an active part in the session. He described the budget as “”niggardly” and “miserly,” “unfit for pursuing strategic goals” and geared to some programs of merely local significance. Luzhkov was apparently alluding to the program to fit Belarusan trucks with Russian engines, depending on state subsidies to two ailing Soviet-era giants: the Minsk truck plant and the Yaroslavl engine plant. The two-year-old plan, endorsed at the highest political level, has been held up by lack of financing.

Leftist members of the Ukrainian and Armenian parliaments, as well as Serbian nationalist parliamentarians, participated in the session as observers. The assembly scheduled a “Slavic” interparliamentary conference for this coming May in Chernihiv, Ukraine, with the apparent intention of appealing to the ethnic Russian vote on behalf of the Ukrainian Red forces in that country’s presidential election campaign (Itar-Tass and other Russian agencies, March 11).

SHEVARDNADZE SAYS CIS COLLECTIVE SECURITY TREATY MUST NOT BECOME AN ALLIANCE.