1 Travel abroad seems hardest on Boris Yeltsin. His often erratic behavior raises instant alarm bells in the West about his health and drinking habits. At home, the same stories barely make the news.
2 Yeltsin did it again last week, with his wobbly descent from his presidential plane and an unsteady arrival at a meeting of fellow leaders in the Kazakh capital, Almaty.
3 The Russian president's vacant expression, his doddering shuffle while he clutched the arm of one official and leaned on another were just the latest signs of Yeltsin's travel troubles.
4 Western media quickly zeroed in on his unsteady gait, while Russian television reports carried carefully pruned reports and focused on Yeltsin's declaration that the Almaty meeting on Friday was a huge success.
5 Yeltsin's fuzziness at the Commonwealth of Independent States summit in Almaty didn't even rate a mention on Russia's premier and often critical television news show, Itogi, in its Sunday evening program.
6 Yeltsin's own press service was indignant at any suggestion the president might be unwell. In a telephone interview, a duty officer suggested it was an old Kazakh custom to walk along a leader and support him with both arms.
7 Some news about Yeltsin's appearance in Almaty did make it into Russian newspapers this weekend, although the stories were bland and not accompanied by photos.
8 Ordinary Russians increasingly compare Yeltsin to former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who was ridiculed for slurring and stumbling in his final days.
9 Reviving an old Soviet tradition, the Segodnya newspaper chose to publish a Western news account -- rather than one by its own correspondent -- about a big celebration in the presidential plane on the way to Almaty.
10 Reports said the in-flight celebration was a 50th birthday party for Vladimir Shumeiko, speaker of the upper house of Russia's parliament. Others said it was a party to honor Yeltsin's chief of protocol Vladimir Shevchenko.
11 The influential Izvestia newspaper noted that Yeltsin failed to show up at a news conference at the end of the summit without giving any reason for missing the previously scheduled meeting with the press.
12 Yeltsin suffers from back and heart ailments, and questions about his health, drinking habits and sometimes bizarre behavior for have dogged him for years.
13 Concerns about his fitness for office have intensified over the past year as Yeltsin gets visibly older and his political opponents become less tolerant of incidents they believe compromise Russia.
14 Yeltsin earlier this month turned 64, five years beyond the average life expectancy for Russian men.
15 Last summer, Yeltsin was criticized following a trip to Germany, where a red-faced president blew kisses to the crowd, led a German band with a wild flourish and sang boisterously.
16 Then, on his way home from a fall summit in the United States, Yeltsin left Ireland's prime minister waiting for him on the airport tarmac while he remained aboard his plane. Yeltsin's aides said he was ill; Yeltsin later said he had simply overslept.
17 In December, Yeltsin retreated for two weeks behind the walls of a well-guarded Kremlin hospital at the beginning of the war in Chechnya, reportedly for a minor operation on his nose.
18 For some Russians, the snippets of Yeltsin leaning on two Kazakh officials in Almaty that did appear on Russian television left no doubt about what their president had been up to.
19 Yeltsin's inability to make it up the stairs in Almaty on his own did not escape the attention of Viktor Ilyukhin, chairman of the Security Committee in the State Duma, parliament's lower house.
20 Ilyukhin renewed his calls for a medical commission to examine all top officials and excoriated Yeltsin for discrediting Russia with his behavior.
21 'The breakup, the economic collapse we see today I partly attribute to the fact our president abuses alcohol,' he told Associated Press Television. 'Our president is incapable of assessing the situation clearly.'

Yeltsin ' s fuzziness at the Commonwealth of Independent States summit in Almaty didn ' t even rate a mention on Russia ' s premier and often critical television news show , Itogi , in its Sunday evening program .
didn ' t even rate a mention
How was this being ignored?