"The 1995 figures take no account of Chechen expenditure," a senior Finance Ministry official said. "Nobody can even imagine how much it is all going to cost."
Another Russian official said estimates for expenditures in Chechnya started at 2 trillion or 3 trillion rubles ($600 million or $900 million), but he could not give a final figure. President Boris Yeltsin sent tanks and troops into Chechnya on Sunday to crush the Caucasus region's three-year independence bid. His soldiers are slowly tightening a noose around the region's capital Grozny.
Russia has promised Chechnya 1 trillion rubles to rebuild its economy once the fighting stops. But the real cost of war is far more than that.
"The problem is that they are shooting at a moving target as far as expenditure is concerned," a Western economist said. "They have certainly been making progress on working out how to boost revenue and make their forecasts more realistic, but that may not be enough."
Parliament last month refused to discuss the government's budget draft, setting up a joint commission with government officials to re-examine the figures. The commission reported back last week.
The latest budget draft, which officials said would face its first reading Wednesday in the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, envisions a deficit of 8 percent of gross domestic product, up from 7.6 percent in a previous draft.
Officials had previously described 7.8 percent as their deficit target.
Russians hope a tough 1995 budget will help Moscow win loans worth billions of dollars from the International Monetary Fund. The latest figures included a forecast of international loans worth 42.8 trillion rubles ($12.6 billion).
The Finance Ministry official said Russia and the IMF had agreed that the IMF board of directors would approve a $6.1 billion stand-by loan once parliament passed the second reading of the 1995 budget.
But a joint statement due for release Friday was much more coy.
"There remain a number of areas where further discussions are needed before the negotiations can be completed," the statement from Russia and the IMF said.
"It is envisaged that the discussions will resume at the beginning of January."
A top-level IMF delegation has just spent two weeks helping Russian officials draw up an economic program for 1995 and the statement said progress had been made in many areas, including monetary policy and measures to boost government revenue.
The new budget raised forecasts for both income and expenditure. It said oil export duties and import taxes would bring in more than the government had originally planned although income tax revenues would be lower.
Expenditures were being changed to take account of higher minimum wages, it said.
The new draft also uses a different ruble-dollar exchange rate from the 3,500 predicted in the previous draft. Figures for the rate were not yet available.
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