World

No Surgery For Yeltsin

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

January 17, 1999 / 9:19 AM EST / CBS

Doctors decided on Wednesday that they don't need to operate on President Boris Yeltsin after he was hospitalized with a bleeding ulcer, the Kremlin said.

Yeltsin received a "controlled gastroscopy" on Wednesday morning, in which a fiber optic thread with a tiny camera passed through his mouth into his stomach, allowing doctors to inspect the ulcer.

Presidential spokesman Dmitry Yakushkin said the exam showed that Yeltsin's ulcer had "stopped bleeding, the inflammation and swelling of tissue stopped and initial signs of healing appeared," Russian news agencies said.

Doctors will continue a course of medicinal treatment, the presidential press service announced.

Yakushkin said the president's condition was stable, and that he had begun working while in the hospital.

Starting Wednesday, doctors allowed Yeltsin to get out of bed to walk around his room and work at a table, Yakushkin said.

Still, chief presidential doctor Sergei Mironov said Yeltsin would need from two weeks to three weeks in the hospital, and would not be allowed to travel for up to three months.

On Tuesday, Yeltsin postponed a scheduled Jan. 28 trip to France after talking to French President Jacques Chirac via telephone. He cut short his last trip, an official visit to Central Asia in the fall, also because of illness.

Yeltsin, 67, has been hospitalized five times since winning re-election in 1996 and has not been to his Kremlin office so far this year. Though the president insists he has not given up any of his powers, Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov now runs most of the country's day-to-day operations.

Yeltsin's latest illness prompted opposition leaders to once again call for his ouster, with the charge led once again by parliamentary firebrand Gennady Zyuganov.

"Since 1995, Yeltsin has not been able to work for a single complete week," he said after initial reports of Yeltsin's latest malady.

Yeltsin insists he will serve out his term, which ends in 2000. Although Primakov has assumed many of the day-to-day duties of government, Yeltsin retains his vast constitutional powers including control of the nuclear button.