Mr Major offered the following: "Decommissioning will also need to be addressed at the beginning of the talks and agreement reached on how [the US Senator] Mitchell's recommendations on decommissioning can be taken forward, without blocking the negotiations."This formulation is opaque and as such it will not in itself satisfy the republican quest for an unambiguous commitment that wide-ranging talks will be on offer. In an uncertain situation, only two things seem clear. There will be a Northern Ireland election on 30 May, and inter-party talks will open in Belfast on 10 June. Almost everything else is in doubt, in an atmosphere full of suspicion. John Major, in his Irish Times article, directly addressed republican concerns about the nature of the 10 June talks. Andrew Hunter, chairman of the Tory backbench Northern Ireland Committee, wrote to Mr Major on Wednesday warning that putting the decommissioning to one side would be "shameful appeasement" and would be seen as a surrender to the IRA.Within minutes of his letter being delivered at Downing Street, he received a telephone call from Sir Patrick Mayhew, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, assuring him there would be no sell out.However, the move is certain to fuel growing fears by Ulster Unionists that the Government is preparing to concede the demands by Dick Spring, the Irish Foreign Minister, for a separate strand of the talks to deal with decommissioning.Mr Hunter remained sceptical and told BBC radio that Mr Major's remarks were "confusing and ambiguous"..

Pressure also was being exerted by Washington on Sinn Fein to accept the move.The Sinn Fein President, Gerry Adams welcomed, the Prime Minister's "aspirational and positive tone" but said he had still not gone far enough in explaining how progress can be achieved. The concern remains among Republicans that if there is a new ceasefire, the Unionists will effectively bring the talks to a halt on day one by refusing to go on unless the IRA starts handing over its weapons.Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble said he also found Mr Major's key sentence "somewhat ambiguous". It used the phrase "without blocking the negotiations", which was one of Sinn Fein's key demands before it would contemplate a ceasefire, Mr Trimble said.Mr Major was is also facing a backlash from some senior Tory backbenchers. His remarks were the culmination of a round of intensive talks to persuade the IRA to abandon its return to violence.The moves - including a telephone call by John Major to John Bruton, the Irish Prime Minister, on Monday - underlined the growing anxiety of Dublin and London at the rejection by Sinn Fein and the IRA of their efforts to restore the ceasefire. It is intended to signal that Britain will not allow the Unionists to use the issue to stall the political talks. A Dublin source said: "It is the last piece in the jigsaw, there can be no excuses now." The change came after the Prime Minister reassured Sinn Fein yesterday that decommissioning would not be addressed "without blocking the negotiations".

The Government is planning to allow decommissioning to be dealt with in one of four committees to be set up by on 10 June. A last-ditch attempt to persuade the IRA to resume its ceasefire was made yesterday when the Cabinet committee on Northern Ireland agreed a compromise formula over decommiss- ioning of IRA weapons. But the early indications from Sinn Fein last night were that the move did not go far enough. Speculation gathered pace last night after he held a meeting with Mr Yavlinsky. Any deal would almost certainly require sackings from his government, possibly the defence minister Pavel Grachev and the prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin.. He knows the presence on the electoral ballot of three other well-known reform-leaning candidates - Grigory Yavlinksy, Svyataslav Fyodorov, and General Alexander Lebed - threatens to steal votes.This week, cautiously, he said he would be willing to consider establishing a "government of national trust" - suggesting that he might try and form an anti-Communist alliance. Moreover, in March, Mr Yeltsin said Russia was "absolutely unprepared'" to consider reduce the penalty for murder to life imprisonment.As Russia digests these fundamental changes, Mr Yeltsin has other problems to worry about.

It is unlikely, though, that he will have pleased the hardliners among his generals. Whether reducing the number of crimes which incur capital punishment will win him any votes is also doubtful. Violent crime in Russia is an epidemic, and there is little evidence of popular support for scrapping the death penalty. Mr Yeltsin is running neck-and-neck in most polls with Mr Zyuganov, but he remains unpopular across much of rural Russia and is by no means certain of victory.Yesterday he appeared to have scored a publicity coup; the end of conscription led the state-run ORT evening television news bulletin. Contract soldiers offer a narrower range of talents than conscripts who, theoretically, come with a broad range of backgrounds and skills.However, in Russia, the system has been teetering on collapse since the end of the Cold War.