Was tired Boris Yeltsin asleep or was he legless in Limerick? – archive, 1994
Tired certainly, but an emotional Russian president? Boris Yeltsin sparked a diplomatic incident yesterday when he was too “indisposed” to get off his plane and have lunch with the Irish prime minister, Albert Reynolds, at Shannon airport.
Both leaders have been under punishing schedules. Mr Reynolds had just returned from New Zealand. Next week he departs for the United States, whence Mr Yeltsin was returning.
Dropping in on Ireland’s west coast, where Aeroflot maintains a large service base, to break bread with Mr Reynolds at nearby Dromoland Castle in the land of a hundred thousand welcomes must have seemed a good idea at the time. It was after all the last leg of the Russian president’s journey home to Moscow, following talks with President Clinton.
Mr Yeltsin’s fondness for an appetite sharpener or two before – or even in place of – a good lunch is the stuff of legends. By lunchtime the rumour was circulating in the wilder reaches of County Clare that Sleepless in Seattle had been Boris’s chosen in-flight movie. Now he was legless in Limerick.
Mr Reynolds’s wife, Kathleen, two cabinet ministers, a clutch of junior ministers and MPs, an Irish army guard of honour and a military band all waited with growing irritation as the long line of officials and flunkeys decanting from the Ilyushin-62 failed to include the superpower leader.
Nearly half an hour passed. Not even the prospect of taxless vodka in the airport’s duty free shop seemed able to entice Mr Yeltsin.
Eventually Mr Reynolds had to make do with a chat with the Russian deputy prime minister, Oleg Soskovets, who later reported that Mr Yeltsin had been “too tired after a 17-hour flight” across the Atlantic to meet his Irish host.
Perhaps ex-Soviet jets fly exceedingly slowly. The Irish, a nation not unfamiliar with the hard stuff, thought differently. “When the crack’s good, who’s watching the clock?” mused a source.
Mr Reynolds was generous enough to tell reporters: “I do not feel there has been any sort of snub. When a man is ill, a man is ill.”
Privately, however, Mr Reynolds could best be described as not a happy taoiseach, robbed of the opportunity to explain the peace process to another world political figure.
In Moscow, meanwhile, the rumour mill went into over-drive. The president was dead; another coup had begun. Eventually Mr Yeltsin surfaced in the capital to declare he was feeling excellent. “I can tell you honestly, I just overslept. Eighteen hours in flight and I had not slept much for such a long time before that.
“The security service did not let in the people who were due to wake me. Of course, I will sort things out and punish them,” he said.
Smug Yeltsin avoids ‘Irish question’
By David Hearst in Moscow
5 October 1994
after newsletter promotion
Wagging his finger at the doubters, President Boris Yeltsin vowed yesterday to accelerate free market reforms, in a blustery performance designed to convince all that he was back in charge at the Kremlin.
Mr Yeltsin told his domestic audience he was taken seriously by the US president, Bill Clinton, with whom he had three hours of “eyeball to eyeball” talks, that as commander in chief of the armed forces he had scuppered the attempt by his defence minister, Pavel Grachev, to take control of the border troops, and that his reforms were on track.
As crowds of protesters surrounded the White House, which was fired on by tanks under Mr Yeltsin’s orders a year ago yesterday, the president told a Kremlin press conference that his action had stopped a civil war: “In 1917 the Red wheel was not stopped. In October 1993 a catastrophe was prevented. This happened because Russians had learnt to tell the truth from lies.”
But he did not feel strong enough to face any questions about his drinking, or the latest incident to rock Russian public opinion – his failure to meet Albert Reynolds, the Irish prime minister, at Shannon airport. The press is now openly casting aspersions on Mr Yeltsin’s behaviour.
Pravda yesterday listed six contradictory official explanations for the Shannon incident. At the airport, reporters were told that Mr Yeltsin had “ordered” Oleg Soskovets, the deputy prime minister, to represent him in talks with Mr Reynolds. But only hours later, on his arrival in Moscow, Mr Yeltsin said he had overslept and would take action against his bodyguards for not waking him up.
At the televised press conference, all but the most anodyne questions were suppressed.
His press secretary, Vyacheslav Kostikov, dismissed the Shannon incident as a matter of “protocol” with no relevance to a press conference devoted to internal matters.