MOSCOW — A top Russian general said Saturday that Moscow expects to secure a deal to extend Russian military presence in the Central Asian nation of Tajikistan by the first half of 2013.

Russia’s ground forces commander Vladimir Chirkin said in an interview on Ekho Mosky radio station that outstanding issues on the terms of the deal will continue to be discussed with Tajikistan until the end of March.

Some 7,000 Russian soldiers are posted across three garrisons in Tajikistan, which is a major transit point on the northbound trafficking route for Afghan heroin.

Tajikistan and other ex-Soviet neighbors of Afghanistan fear a spillover of violence in the event of a renewed outbreak of civil conflict after the NATO coalition’s withdrawal in 2014.

An agreement to extend the current lease, which expires in 2014, has been delayed amid reported disagreements about the financial terms.

Chirkin said the Russian troops would work in a coalition with local forces, something that Tajikistan is believed to have pushed for during negotiations.

Tajikistan has said it would like $300 million annually in cash or equivalent in military assistance for the bases. “We will undoubtedly provide military and technical assistance so that this coalition is fully supplied,” Chirkin said. “How large (that assistance) is to be will be calculated by the specialists.”

In September, the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said the current lease might be extended by 49 years.

The Russian 201st Motorized Rifle Division deployed in Tajikistan is the largest current deployment of Russian troops abroad. It is based in garrisons near the capital, Dushanbe, and in the southern cities of Kulyab and Kurgan-Tube, both close to the Afghan border.

Russia’s military presence helped negotiate an end to the five-year civil war that devastated Tajikistan in the 1990s.

Tajikistan has in recent years struggled to quell a series of relatively small-scale domestic Islamist-inspired insurgencies and stamp its authority across all regions of the largely mountainous nation of seven million people.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is due to visit Tajikistan on Oct. 5.

Russian plant fire kills seven

Seven people were killed and eight others were injured when a major fire broke out at an industrial waste treatment plant in Russia’s oil-rich north, the emergencies ministry said on Saturday. “Seven people died, (and) eight people received injuries,” the regional emergencies ministry said in a statement, adding that the survivors were hospitalized.

The fire broke out early Saturday at a industrial waste treatment plant located between the cities of Tyumen and Khanty-Mansiisk in the oil-rich north.

Officials said earlier four people had perished in the fire, but rescue teams found more bodies as they combed through the debris of the plant, a regional emergencies ministry spokesman, Sergei Didenko, told AFP.

The fire which consumed an area spanning 2,300 square metrers has now been contained, the ministry said, adding that there was no threat to residential communities. Industrial accidents including fires are common in Russia and are often linked to aging equipment and lax enforcement of safety rules. — Agencies