After Failure to Oust Chechen Leader, Russia Seeks Release of Prisoners : Negotiations: President of breakaway republic agrees to free soldiers, Moscow’s defense minister says.

Foiled in its attempts to oust the rebel leader of the breakaway republic of Chechnya, Russia dispatched two key ministers Tuesday to negotiate the release of its prisoners of war.

Defense Minister Pavel S. Grachev announced on Russian television late Tuesday that President Dzhokar Dudayev of Chechnya had agreed to release Russian POWs captured 11 days ago during an attempt to storm Dudayev’s presidential palace in Grozny, the Chechen capital.

In a bid to avert an all-out war with the oil-rich Muslim region, Grachev and Interior Minister Viktor F. Yerin had flown to the southern Russian republic of Ingushetia to meet with Dudayev in the remote village of Ordzhonikidzevskaya. Grachev and Dudayev both declared themselves “satisfied” with the meeting. Terms of the POW release, if any, were not disclosed.

“Neither Chechnya nor anybody else in the North Caucasus is going to war with Moscow,” Dudayev declared, defusing fears of an imminent Russian attack on the defiant Caucasian republic.

Grachev said the Russian Security Council will meet Thursday to decide how to resolve the Chechen conflict.

Although Chechnya declared independence in 1991, Russia has never recognized it as a sovereign nation. Russian officials have accused Dudayev of sponsoring terrorism and providing haven to mobsters, hijackers and bandits. Still, Moscow was obliged to try to negotiate a settlement after a covert campaign to oust Dudayev turned into a fiasco last week.

Russian bombing attacks in which civilians, some of them children, perished appear only to have intensified the Chechens’ historic hostility toward Russia and boosted Dudayev’s failing popularity, according to reports from Grozny.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin flip-flopped by first ordering Chechens to lay down their arms and then, when his deadline passed and nothing happened, allowing aides to claim the order had been “misunderstood.”

About 70 people, including at least 16 Russian service personnel, remain prisoners in Grozny, where they have given damaging interviews contradicting Moscow’s official version of events.

Dudayev has released four other prisoners as a “gesture of goodwill” to two different visiting delegations of Russian lawmakers, who in return have asked Yeltsin to halt the bombing.

On Tuesday, a third delegation headed by liberal economist and lawmaker Grigory A. Yavlinsky flew to Chechnya and its members offered themselves as hostages in exchange for the Russian POWs. Chechen Foreign Minister Shamsedin Yusef politely rejected the swap.

As the conflict drags on, the Russian Parliament, press and public are voicing strident opposition to armed intervention in Chechnya.

“Chechnya is an inseparable part of Russia, but we are against establishing law and order there with fire and sword,” said Yegor T. Gaidar, head of Russia’s Democratic Choice political party and a Yeltsin loyalist.

The Communist newspaper Pravda and the Russian Orthodox Church concurred with the liberal Gaidar, a situation as rare as fresh strawberries in a Moscow winter.

A Russian Islamic leader, Mufti Hazrat Ravil Gainutdin, warned that military escalation of the Chechnya conflict would “inevitably” draw in other Russian minority groups--including Muslims.

Valeriya I. Novodvorskaya, a former Soviet dissident, compared the mood in the Kremlin to that of August, 1968, the eve of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. “The same threats to introduce troops if the Chechens do not give up their freedom and independence, the same tension, the same massing of troops on the border,” she said. “We shouldn’t allow Russian democracy to slide into bloody fascism.”

Izvestia newspaper reported in today’s editions that Dudayev commands 11,000 to 12,000 soldiers armed with tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery and antiaircraft and antitank guns. Russia has massed “a tremendous number of troops” in the border region of Mozdok, the newspaper reported.

The covert operation to oust Dudayev was kept so secret that even a senior Russian army commander was unaware that his officers were being recruited by the counterintelligence service to fight in Chechnya.

Maj. Gen. Boris Polyakov resigned last weekend in protest when he learned that his elite officers were serving in Chechnya without his knowledge, a unit spokesman confirmed.

On Tuesday, Russian journalists blasted their government for shameless mendacity about the near-civil war in Chechnya.

After insisting for months that Russia was not backing anti-Dudayev rebels, then maintaining that fighters captured in Grozny were not Russian and that Russia had nothing to do with warplanes bombing Chechnya last week, Grachev on Monday admitted Russian involvement.

Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper responded by running a photograph of Grachev under the banner headline: “Unidentified Lying Object.”