Yeltsin More Active But Puts Off Paris Trip

MOSCOW (Reuters) - President Boris Yeltsin was in astable condition and feeling better in a Moscow hospital on Tuesday, two days after being rushed in with a bleeding stomach ulcer, the Kremlin said. He finally bowed to the inevitable, however, and offici

ally postponed next week`s state visit to France until mid-March. His doctors have said the 67-year-old leader is likely to need two to three weeks in hospital, whether he requires surgery or not. "The president is more active. He`s looking through current documents that are coming from his staff and at the latest newspapers," Yeltsin`s press secretary, Dmitry Yakushkin, was quoted as saying by a Kremlin spokesman. Reading Tuesday`s newspapers would have reminded him that Russians have become used to his frequent illnesses and that Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov was regarded as being in full command of the country as his government tried to get its 1999 budget through a second reading in parliament on Tuesday. Yakushkin said a doctors` conference agreed his condition was stable and his temperature and blood pressure normal. Doctors planned a new gastroscopic examination on Wednesday, a procedure that they said on Monday would help them decide whether to treat the ulcer surgically or keep relying on drugs. Yeltsin`s chief of staff, Nikolai Bordyuzha, told Itar-Tass agency that the doctors were allowing the president no visitors other than his family and had confined him strictly to bed. But, since news of his illness broke on Sunday, his planned state visit to Paris on January 28 and 29 had always seemed certain to be put off. It finally was postponed when he spoke to French President Jacques Chirac by telephone on Tuesday. Impatience with Yeltsin`s latest absence has fuelled new calls for him to step aside 18 months ahead of schedule. In the hostile, Communist-led State Duma, the lower house of parliament which was expected to pass Primakov`s budget on Tuesday at the second of four readings, some deputies have also been calling for an end to perceived paralysis in the Kremlin. Vladimir Davidenko of the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democrats told Interfax the Duma might ask the Constitutional Court to review whether Yeltsin should be removed on the grounds of "persistent incapacity due to (ill) health".