Аннотация:With use of cumulants of two-electron density matrices semi-empirical and DFT methods are analyzed from a point of view of their suitability to describe qualitative features of electronic correlation important for molecular modelling of electronic structure of the transition metal complexes (TMC). It is shown that traditional semiempirical methods relying upon the Hartree-Fock-Roothaan form of the trial wave function suffer from a. structural deficiency not allowing them to distinguish the energies of the atomic multiplets of the TMCs' d-shells. The same applies to the DFT methodology. On the other hand, the effective Hamiltonian of the crystal field (EHCF) previously proposed by the authors is shown to be suitable for further parameterization. It has been applied for calculations of geometries in a series of polyatomic spin-active TMCs and has shown remarkable precision and an overall consistency. This allowed to solve in a sequential manner two long standing problems: extending molecular mechanics to transition metals and developing semiempirical quantum mechanical (QM) methods for transition metals.