MOSCOW, Oct 1: Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov warned on Friday that the Russian armed forces were on the verge of collapse because people were avoiding the draft and less than 10 per cent of those eligible were showing up at enlistment stations.

Ivanov said in televised remarks that 176,000 soldiers would be enlisted in the October-December draft season - less than one in every 10 of the people eligible for the draft. "By comparison I can say that just 10 years ago, in 1994, we called up 30 percent of all of those eligible.

Now it is less than 10 percent. "This really is a critical line and we cannot go any lower, otherwise we will simply lose our armed forces," Ivanov said at a military base in Oryol.

Russian men must serve for at least two years in the armed forces some time between the ages of 18 and 27, depending on whether they go to university. But an embedded fear of service in a cash-strapped military, where morale is low and cases of brutal and often deadly hazing are on the rise, have spun a web of ways out of the draft - from false medical certificates to direct bribes.

"We are the champions of the world when it comes to duty deferments," Ivanov quipped. One reason Russians fear the draft is Chechnya, with the last campaign launched five years ago Friday.

A band of several thousand guerrillas has been standing up against a Russian contingent of up to 80,000 soldiers, with the war now a deadly stalemate with casualties reported on an almost daily basis. Soldiers' rights committees have complained that Russian teenagers with only a few months training were being thrown into one of the deadliest war zones on earth. -AFP