Russia Takes Hard Line on Chechnya : Caucasus: Kremlin withdraws offer for peace summit with breakaway republic, says it is preparing to bomb capital. Moscow launches rocket attack on village.

The Kremlin withdrew its offer for a peace summit with Russia’s tiny breakaway republic of Chechnya on Saturday and said it was preparing to bomb the rebel capital into submission.

Shortly after midnight today, Russian forces launched a rocket attack on the village of Pervomaiskoe, 15 miles north of the heavily armed capital of Grozny, according to Chechen military sources.

Just before dawn today, Russian warplanes again reportedly streaked over Grozny but did not strike.

Gen. Dzhokar M. Dudayev, the Chechen leader, sent two urgent messages during the evening accepting a 2-day-old Kremlin offer of top-level peace talks. But the Security Council said that only leaders of the military operation would meet with him and only to discuss disarming his supporters.

In grave tones, Russian authorities made it clear that their hardening campaign against a 3-year-old declaration of independence by the oil-rich Muslim republic had reached its apex.

“Starting at midnight, Interior and Defense Ministry forces will take decisive steps, using all means at their disposal to restore order,” a Foreign Ministry communique said. “Bandit groups will then be disarmed, and those which dare to resist will be destroyed.”

Among the “decisive steps” planned, said Deputy Prime Minister Nikolai D. Yegorov, were air strikes and ground-to-ground rocket attacks on “strategic objects” in Grozny.

Russian officials appealed to journalists and other noncombatants to leave the city. But five anti-war members of the Russian Parliament remained there in protest.

Chechen authorities threatened to execute 20 captured Russian soldiers if bombing started. From an old Soviet textbook, they read instructions on television to the estimated 200,000 people still in Grozny on how to use grenades to cripple invading tanks.

“When the bombing starts, we will go to our shelters, and when it is finished we will go out to defend the city,” said Chechen government spokesman Movladi Yudugov.

As the deadline approached, a defiant mood gripped the Chechen capital, a city of half-finished apartment blocks and decrepit oil refineries 1,000 miles south of Moscow. Reporters leaving the city said roads were crowded with both people fleeing and gunmen driving in to defend the place. The main square was packed with part of the republic’s irregular army of several thousand.

Chechnya’s militant nationalism poses the most serious challenge to President Boris N. Yeltsin’s government since Communists and other hard-liners seized the Parliament building in Moscow in October, 1993, and staged a two-day armed rebellion that was put down by tanks.

Fearing an unraveling of the huge, multiethnic Russian Federation, Yeltsin has refused to recognize Chechnya’s independence. But only in recent months has he gone along with demands by hawks in his government to crush the secession drive.

The Security Council, which met for three hours in the Kremlin hospital where Yeltsin is recovering from nose surgery, chose to resort to bombs and rockets after a week of sluggish, hesitant convergence on Grozny by thousands of troops in three columns of tanks--Moscow’s biggest such operation since the war in Afghanistan.

One tank column commander was recalled from Chechnya on Saturday after halting his advance 20 miles west of Grozny and promising villagers that his men would never fire on civilians, regardless of orders.

The threat of air attacks was a shift that came after Yeltsin delayed a Thursday deadline for Chechnya to disarm within 48 hours and offered to send a “full-powered high-level delegation” to meet Dudayev. Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin announced Friday that he would head the Russian side and meet anywhere Dudayev wanted.

First Dudayev balked, insisting that Russia pull its troops out before he would talk, and by Saturday the offer from Chernomyrdin had vanished. The Security Council gave Dudayev an ultimatum to come to Mozdok, a military garrison town in southern Russia, to work out the details of disarming Chechnya with Yegorov and Sergei V. Stepashin, Russia’s chief of counterintelligence--two key figures in the military operation.

“If this does not happen, no other question will be discussed,” a Russian official said.

The rebel general rejected the ultimatum but appealed twice, to Chernomyrdin and then to Yeltsin, for talks “at a proper level” on all issues, including the disarming of Chechen fighters. He reminded Yeltsin that the rebel forces were under orders not to shoot.

Interfax news agency reported that a telegram sent to Yeltsin at 9 p.m. arrived in Yeltsin’s office 30 minutes after the midnight deadline expired. But the Itar-Tass news agency quoted well-informed sources as saying that the telegram had arrived before midnight. The Kremlin did not respond.

Yeltsin and a shrinking circle of hawkish supporters have also ignored a monthlong chorus of anti-war protest from inside Russia.

The Federation Council, the upper house of Russia’s Parliament, took Dudayev’s side Saturday in demanding high-level peace talks and a cease-fire. Yegor T. Gaidar, once Yeltsin’s acting prime minister and close adviser, called the Security Council ultimatum “a tragic mistake.”

“They talk about disarming illegal armed units, but I cannot imagine how the whole Chechen nation could be disarmed now,” said Ruslan Aushev, president of the neighboring Russian republic of Ingushetia. “Starting from 15-year-old boys, and even younger, all who can carry weapons, including women, have risen to defend their republic. They are ready to hold on to the end.”

Officials in Moscow said the Russian troops outside Grozny would enter the city to collect arms. But their willingness to attempt this against violent resistance was in doubt. Just one of the three columns, the one moving from the north, has managed to reach the edge of the city after a week in Chechnya.

Russian troops deliberately left roads south from the city open, to allow unarmed people to flee. But the Interior Ministry said Chechen fighters had also left in that direction to set up camps in the mountains and launch a guerrilla war.

Aides said Yeltsin was preparing a decree to impose a Moscow-appointed government in Chechnya that would call new elections.

Faced with wariness in the West over the Kremlin’s drift toward war, the Foreign Ministry appealed for understanding of actions against “a threat of armed extremism” in “an inalienable part of the Russian Federation.”

Boudreaux reported from Moscow and Goldberg from Grozny. Times staff writer Sonni Efron in Moscow contributed to this report.