Russia Moves to Encircle Capital of Rebel State

Russian troops and tanks began to tighten the noose around the capital of the rebel republic of Chechnya on Sunday, killing at least four civilians and wounding 12 others who tried to block their advance.

The Kremlin’s decision to use force to regain control of the oil-rich, defiant Muslim republic while its rebel leader was offering to negotiate for peace drove President Boris N. Yeltsin’s staunchest liberal defenders into the streets in protest.

“I fear for the fate of Russian democracy,” said Yegor T. Gaidar, the economist who was once Yeltsin’s acting prime minister and the symbol of Russia’s free-market economic reforms.

Gaidar demanded that the Russian military refrain from storming Grozny, the Chechen capital. By early today, it was still unclear whether the troops intended to capture the city of 400,000 or merely encircle it and demand the surrender of Chechnya’s president, Dzhokar M. Dudayev.

Chechen officials at first canceled peace talks that had been scheduled for today. Later Sunday, they said a delegation of eight Chechens will meet with their Russian counterparts today in Vladikavkaz in the Russian republic of Ingushetia.

The Russian action began at dawn Sunday, when a force estimated at 40,000 and backed by tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery, helicopters and jets began moving toward Grozny from three directions.

Despite pockets of resistance from residents who took shots at their gasoline tanks and wheels, three Russian columns began advancing toward Grozny in a pincers movement from Ingushetia to the west, from the town of Mozdok to the northwest and from the republic of Dagestan to the east, according to reports reaching Moscow.

The northern force had reportedly halted and made camp eight miles from Grozny.

As footage of up to 400 Russian tanks and armored vehicles rolling toward Grozny appeared on Russian television, Gaidar and other democrats gathered in Moscow’s central Pushkin Square for an impromptu anti-war protest.

The democrats, who stuck with Yeltsin through double-digit inflation and backed his storming of the Russian Parliament building last year, said Yeltsin had gone too far in Chechnya. They said military meddling will spark an escalating cycle of ethnic violence in the volatile Caucasus region and could undermine Russia’s own freedom.

“Our president is becoming dangerous to our country,” said Grigory A. Yavlinsky, a democratic lawmaker who recently returned from a meeting with Dudayev and reported that the Chechen leader was ready to seek a peaceful solution. “This means tomorrow we may solve other domestic conflicts in the same way.”

Angered by the criticism of Yeltsin by his own party, Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev announced he was quitting Gaidar’s Democratic Choice of Russia party. “Democracy is not anarchy and separatism,” Kozyrev said.

Yeltsin, who was released from the hospital Sunday after reportedly undergoing an operation to correct a deviated septum in his nose, responded by releasing a statement late Sunday saying that the military intervention was necessary “to find a political solution” to the conflict in Chechnya and to “protect its citizens from armed extremism.”

Since August, Chechen opposition forces armed and backed by Russia have been trying to overthrow Dudayev, a former Soviet air force general who came to power in a disputed election in 1991 and then declared the republic of 1.2 million people to be independent of Russia. Moscow accuses Dudayev of providing a safe base for terrorists, drug smugglers and gangsters.

Last week, after a covert attempt to oust Dudayev ended in the humiliating capture of Russian soldiers, Moscow admitted having helped the rebels and sending its planes to bomb Grozny.

In his statement, Yeltsin said he was prompted to send troops by “the threat to the integrity of Russia, to the safety of citizens both in Chechnya and beyond its borders” and by the possibility of wider destabilization. He said anyone who lays down arms before Thursday will receive amnesty.

In Miami, President Clinton offered a mild reaction to the Russian action, calling the troop movements an “internal Russian affair.”

“Obviously, it’s something we’re monitoring closely. We’re concerned about it . . . and we hope that order can be restored with a minimum amount of bloodshed and violence,” Clinton said at the conclusion of the weekend Summit of the Americas.

The Russian troop movements come at a time of increasing tension between the United States and Russia over Bosnia-Herzegovina and the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into Eastern Europe. In the past few weeks, Russia has spurned a Western offer to join the Partnership for Peace--a form of adjunct relationship to NATO--and resisted Western efforts for new steps against the Bosnian Serbs.

Those differences have led some American officials to talk privately of coolness in the U.S.-Russian relationship and have provided ammunition for Republican critics who maintain that Clinton has placed too much emphasis on maintaining good relations with Russia at the cost of other objectives, such as folding the former Soviet Bloc into NATO.

Clinton defended his policy Sunday. “I’ll do whatever is necessary to protect our interests,” he said. “But I think, on balance, our policy has been the right one and . . . there have been far more pluses than minuses to it.”

For his part, Dudayev told Russia’s Itar-Tass news agency that the conflict with Moscow could easily be settled.

“The two sides need only to sit down at the negotiating table to achieve that,” Dudayev said. But he warned, “We will defend ourselves” against Russian attack, and he laid the blame for any bloodshed squarely on the Kremlin’s doorstep.

Three Russian soldiers have already come home from Chechnya in coffins, and public opinion is running against the intervention. In a poll by the Mnenie firm last week, 58% of the 600 Russians surveyed opposed sending troops to Chechnya, and only 20% favored the move.

Cossack leaders in Russia’s northern Caucasus region condemned Moscow’s use of force against Chechnya. So did Ingush President Ruslan Aushev, who warned of blood feuds that could endure for decades.

“Are the troops going to be there for a year, for two years?” Aushev asked on the weekly TV show “Itogi.” “Tomorrow, there will be one shot, then the next day another shot--and everyone will be dragged into a guerrilla war . . . and then there will be revenge for the murdered.”

Times staff writer Ronald Brownstein in Washington contributed to this report.

* YELTSIN’S GAMBLE: Chechnya invasion is fraught with risks for president. A33