MOSCOW. April 6 (Interfax-AVN) - NATO is going to allocate over 420,000 euros in 2005 for social adaptation of retiring Russian officers, said Patrick Hardouin, Deputy Assistant of the NATO Secretary General.
In his interview with the Krasnaya Zvezda daily published in Wednesday, Hardouin said that NATO's participation in the projects is unique, as the alliance does not cooperate with any other partner in the sphere of social adaptation and retraining of retired officers so closely.
According to him, the funding of the project is still not so large, but on the other hand it is not small, as NATO is going to spend over 420,000 euros for this purpose in 2005.
There will be close monitoring of how the money is going to be spent, Hardouin said. There is a mechanism of independent audit, and the meetings of a special group of the NATO-Russia Council are organized in Brussels annually, this group supervising the activity of the Center of Social Adaptation and its affiliates in Russia. He said that they are quite satisfied with the cooperation they have with Russia in this sphere.
According to Hardouin, a total of 900 people have received support from the Center since 2001, of which about 350 were retrained under the program of teaching specialists in servicemen's social adaptation and the rest 500 plus under the direct retraining programs. The former is specially intended to train officers to be specialists in the sphere of social adaptation of retired Armed Forces' servicemen. The processes will gain momentum, and therefore there will be a certain need for such kind of specialists, he said.
There are six regional affiliates of the Center, namely in St. Petersburg, Kaliningrad, Yaroslavl, Rostov-on-Don, Perm and Novosibirsk. This fact helps to step up the process and cover a large territory directly at places where military installations are located, the NATO official thinks.