on Yartsev's birthday, Sergei Stepashin, who was the Prime Minister of Russia at the time, gave Yartsev a sabre as a birthday gift in a sideline pre-game ceremony. Yartsev got another head coach position soon enough, when he joined Rotor Volgograd in January 2000. However, he could not do much with that team either and was fired in June of same year. For the next three years he was the manager of the Spartak Moscow veterans team. In August 2003, Russia was very close to elimination from their Euro 2004 preliminary qualification group and the coach Valery Gazzayev, was fired. Most of the other high-level Russian coaches have already coached the national team at one point or another, so unexpectedly Russian soccer federation decided to put Yartsev in charge. Under Yartsev's management, Russia qualified for the playoff preliminary qualification matches, in which they beat Wales. That series ended with controversy. First Russia asked UEFA to disqualify Wales midfielder Ryan Giggs for elbowing a Russian defender in the first leg of the playoffs, which UEFA refused to do. Later key Russian midfielder Egor Titov was disqualified for testing positive for an illegal performance-enhancing drug, Wales asked to be declared winners because of that, but that request was ultimately denied and their court case dismissed. In UEFA Euro 2004 Russia lost the first two games to Spain and Portugal 1–0 and 2–0 and was the first team to be eliminated. After the first game Yartsev sent home one of the most experienced Russian midfielders, Alexander Mostovoi, after Mostovoi complained to the press that Yartsev is overworking players in training sessions, so they do not have any energy left for the games. Yartsev changed lineup extensively in every game, first because some key defenders were injured and he had to play the reserves and young players, and then because of disqualifications to Roman Sharonov and Sergei Ovchinnikov, who were sent off in the first two games. In their third and final game, Russia defeated Greece 2–1. That ended up being the only Greek loss in the whole tournament as Greece eventually won it all, defeating Portugal in the finals (Russia was not very lucky in getting drawn into the same group as two eventual finalists). Yartsev was not fired despite not coming out of the group stage. After a 7–1 loss to Portugal in the 2006 FIFA World Cup qualifying Yartsev kept his