President Boris Yeltsin returned to Moscow on Friday from a three-day trip to the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia, where he had given a string of pledges to support the local economy.


Yeltsin promised to sign a decree "before September" to rescue the underground plant in the closed city of Krasnoyarsk-26 that currently produces weapons-grade plutonium, Itar-Tass reported.


All the plant's reactors will be closed and plutonium production will wind down, the agency said. In their place construction will be resumed on a nuclear-fuel reprocessing plant and a new power station will be built.


Segodnya reported Thursday that 2 trillion rubles is needed to complete the reprocessing plant, "money which the regional treasury does not have."


"We don't need weapons-grade plutonium," Yeltsin told Segodnya. "We are not intending to develop nuclear weapons. On the contrary, we are dismantling them."


Yeltsin also promised credits for the timber industry, which dominates the economy of the vast Siberian region four times the size of France. He will ask Sergei Dubinin, the acting finance minister, to find a way of "lowering railway freight tariffs on the Transsiberian line," according to Itar-Tass.