President Yeltsin retired yesterday to a sanatorium that has already witnessed his darkest medical days, forcing advisers to step up efforts to prove it was business as usual in the Kremlin.
Mr Yeltsin (67) moved to the same Barvikha hospital and rest-home complex west of Moscow that has been home for long stretches over the past two years.
The president went to convalesce there after a 1996 heart bypass operation and a winter 1997 bout of double pneumonia.
He was greeted yesterday by a team of Kremlin doctors who began to evaluate his failing health and prescribe the best treatment for asthenia - a vague ailment in which a patient grows exhausted and depressed.
Silent and heavily-edited television footage of Mr Yeltsin shot early yesterday showed a pasty and vacant-looking president meeting the Prime Minister, Mr Yevgeny Primakov.
But despite the glum footage, the Kremlin was doing its best to play down his latest ailments, which forced him to pull out of a scheduled trip to Vienna and send Mr Primakov to the EU-Russia summit in his place.
Several Kremlin sources have since said Mr Yeltsin has been counselled against taking future foreign trips until his term as president expires in 2000.
Kremlin officials have, however, insisted there was "no change" to Moscow visits. A press officer said the Japanese Prime Minister, Mr Keizo Obuchi, and President Jiang Zemin of China were expected this year.
Mr Primakov (68) also dismissed speculation in Moscow that he is taking over as Russia's de facto head of state. On Monday he declared Mr Yeltsin was in "very good working condition".
Such diagnoses have been openly mocked by the opposition. "The current incapacity of the president is worsening the situation in Russia," remarked the powerful speaker of parliament, Mr Gennady Seleznyov, a Communist.