Chechens Agree to Free Several POWs : Caucasus: Russian lawmakers, families of captives plead for negotiated end to crisis.

President Dzhokar Dudayev of Chechnya has agreed to release several wounded Russian soldiers captured during covert missions inside the breakaway Muslim republic, Russian news agencies reported Friday.

As jets bombed the defiant Caucasus mountain republic for the fourth day, a delegation of Russian lawmakers met with Dudayev in the capital city of Grozny to plead for the release of about 70 prisoners--including at least 20 Russian soldiers--captured in an attack on the presidential palace last Saturday.

Dudayev agreed “in principle” to release “two or three people as a gesture of goodwill from the Chechen side,” a presidential aide told the Interfax news service Friday evening. The fate of the remaining captives remains unclear.

Meanwhile, public opinion in Russia seemed squarely against going to war to pacify Chechnya.

Families of the captured Russian soldiers, as well as Russian church officials, opinion leaders and politicians, warned Moscow against sending troops to the oil-rich republic and pleaded for a nonviolent settlement of the crisis.

Russian officials continued to deny that they were directing and arming the rebels who have been attempting to overthrow Dudayev since August.

Dudayev, a fierce former Soviet air force general, came to power in a disputed election in 1991. He immediately declared independence for Chechnya and has been a thorn in Russia’s southern belly ever since.

The delegation of Russian lawmakers, headed by Sergei Yushenkov, chairman of the Defense Committee of the Duma, the lower house of Parliament, said the origin of the warplanes bombing Grozny was undeniable.

They appealed to Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin to “please do anything possible to stop the bombing.”

“It is clear that these planes are not English or French but Russian,” said former Social Welfare Minister Ella Pamfilova, who quit Yeltsin’s Cabinet in January. “This is against the law.”

Mothers of 20 Russian soldiers who had seen their captured sons paraded on television sent a telegram to Parliament earlier this week after the Russian Defense Ministry said the troops captured in Chechnya were there on leave.

Their families say they were not volunteers but conscripts sent by Moscow to help overthrow Dudayev--and blasted the Russian army for repudiating its own POWs.

One 18-year-old prisoner interviewed by Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper said he was ordered to drive a T-72 tank to a suburb of Grozny and hand it over to the anti-Dudayev opposition.

Yeltsin sacked the intelligence agency’s No. 2 official, Yevgeny Savostyanov, on Friday. The intelligence agency said the men were volunteers who were protecting the Russian constitutional system on Russian territory--in Chechnya.

Dudayev supporters demanded that one Russian soldier be hanged in retaliation for each air strike. Chechen officials said 13 people had been killed and at least 10 injured by bombing since Thursday. The casualty reports could not be confirmed.

Though Russia has massed troops on the Chechen border, Yeltsin made no moves to enforce his ultimatum to Chechens to stop fighting or face intervention.

Politicians and scholars warned that Russia could become bogged down in a guerrilla war “worse than Afghanistan” if it sends troops to try to force the republic to submit to rule from Moscow.

In Moscow, officials fearful of Chechen terrorist attacks inside Russia beefed up security around nuclear power plants, armories, communication centers and government offices--and ordered Federal Counterintelligence Agency employees to work 13-hour days.