Bombing Raid Ratchets up Chechen Fight : Russia: Moscow seals off rebellious region, Grozny braces for war, but talks are scheduled.

Russia sealed off the rebellious Muslim region of Chechnya on Saturday and staged a bombing raid near its capital, Grozny, in a new escalation of the festering conflict that many warn could turn into another Afghanistan for the Kremlin.

President Boris N. Yeltsin, who was laid-up in the hospital after a minor operation on his nose, had effectively instructed his government Friday to proceed without him in “using all means at the state’s disposal” to subdue the defiant Chechens.

Whatever means Moscow uses, whether further negotiations or a full-out attack by the Russian troops massed at Chechnya’s borders, that will not be easy.

The Chechens who populate the mountainous region of southern Russia are known as a tough, warlike people with a penchant for organized crime, and they have reportedly been reinforced by Moslem brethren from Afghanistan and elsewhere.

“I’m afraid to confess that the situation has already gotten beyond my control,” Dzhokar Dudayev, the moustachioed Chechen president, told Saturday’s Izvestia newspaper. “In every village, in every district, Islamic batallions have been formed. . . When our general staff gives them orders, they reply, ‘We are God’s fighters, not yours.’ ”

Residents of Grozny were said to be bracing for war, beefing up their civil defenses and gathering volunteers for grassroots militias. Reuters news agency reporters saw Russian warplanes bomb military targets near Grozny, and more raids were expected.

But Russian analysts predicted that Yeltsin, aware that anti-war sentiment dominates both in Parliament and among the public at large, would not launch an all-out invasion.

Rather, the Izvestia newspaper said, he is likely to perform a “balancing act on the edge of war” by asserting Russian control without undertaking operations that would lead to mass casualties.

Talks between Moscow, Grozny and the Kremlin-backed opposition to Dudayev were scheduled to resume Monday.

It was not clear whether Dudayev would consent to talk with his Chechen enemies. But the Russian deputy head of the peace talks commission, Vyacheslav Mikhailov, said Grozny officials had “reiterated in phone conversations their intention to use this last chance to achieve a peaceful solution of the crisis.”

The sealing of the Chechen borders aimed to block the continuing flow of arms and Afghan mujaheddin fighters into the mainly Muslim republic of about 1 million people. The Russian government also ordered the Defense Ministry to close off Chechnya’s airspace.

But along with waving sticks, the Kremlin was offering carrots to Chechnya. The government issued a decree mandating radical--though unspecified--measures to restore parts of the North Caucasus economy damaged in the conflict.