Chechnya Shuns Moscow’s Terms for Peace Talks

As Russian warplanes and artillery pounded the perimeter of his capital, the president of the rebellious republic of Chechnya said Sunday that he is willing to resume peace talks with Moscow--but only on his besieged home ground. His condition kept the conflict at an impasse.

Speaking to reporters in the flag-draped bunker beneath his presidential headquarters, Gen. Dzhokar M. Dudayev declared that he is not a lackey “who will go anywhere at the wiggle of a finger.”

Russian forces have been bombarding scattered points in Chechnya off and on since thousands of troops moved into the breakaway region Dec. 11, but Dudayev turned down flat a proposal that he venture out of Chechnya to meet a Kremlin emissary in the southern Russian city of Mozdok, 60 miles away.

Instead, Dudayev said in a terse telegram dispatched to Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin on Sunday evening, “I am prepared to receive your authorized representatives” in Grozny, the Chechen capital.

Dudayev made no pretense of softening his stance on Chechnya’s demand for independence and said, “Relations with Russia amount to a state of war.”

A Yeltsin spokesman, Yuri Leonov, said Dudayev’s message “did not answer” the president’s proposal. “There will be no more answers to Dudayev’s telegrams,” he added.

The latest fruitless exchange over peace talks, which collapsed Wednesday, came amid some of the heaviest bombing yet in Chechnya, an oil-rich republic of 1.2 million people in the northern Caucasus Mountains. One bomb hit an electric power station, blacking out part of the capital.

Planes roared over Grozny minutes after a Russian ultimatum to the Muslim Chechens to lay down their arms expired at midnight Saturday. Dudayev said Russian bombs and artillery hit dozens of places just outside the city, including the republic’s television transmission center.

“The fire is aimed at military targets, but shells hit civilian houses,” said Sergei Kovalyov, one of five Russian lawmakers who came to Grozny to protest the war. “I have seen destroyed civilian houses and dead bodies of civilians with my own eyes.”

Neither he nor any other official gave casualty figures among the Chechens. Four more Russian soldiers were reported killed Sunday, raising the total to 20 in the 8-day-old operation.

Russian authorities said they were hitting ammunition depots, Chechen troop concentrations and other strategic targets. They claimed to have struck five bridges over the Terek River, although no one here was able to find any that were damaged.

In the Staropromyshlovsky district on the edge of Grozny, there did not seem to be anything even remotely strategic about the food warehouse where watchman Magomed Murtazov was jolted awake by a missile attack at 5:30 a.m.

The attack left a crater outside his shack five feet wide and his kitchen dishes covered in crumbled plaster and rubble.

“They thought this was a military base,” he said, shrugging.

A few blocks away, women and children from areas pounded heavily by artillery in recent days huddled in the claustrophobic confines of an aging bomb shelter. Unheated but warmed by the clammy breaths of its unhappy inhabitants, the shelter gets so full at night that there is barely room to sit, the women said.

“They just want to destroy,” said Ruslan Ushmanov, commander of a nearby Chechen fighter base that may have been the target of the missile. Ushmanov said he didn’t think the Russians were necessarily aiming at him.

“They want to destroy houses,” he said. “They just want to destroy everything we have. . . . These are psychological attacks. They keep us expecting them at any moment.”

If the tension of unpredictable attacks was meant to break down the Chechens’ defiance, it appeared to be having the opposite effect among the shelter’s inhabitants.

Lubov Mutsayeva, a 68-year-old woman still recovering from a recent operation, vowed that if only the Russians would stop their aerial bombing and try to take Chechnya by land, “I swear by Allah, I will bite them through the throat with my teeth.

“Our hot Chechen blood is like Gypsy blood,” she said. “One of our boys can kill 500 of theirs.”

Other Russian strikes fell on cowsheds in the village of Petropavlovskaya near Grozny.

What would seem to be the most obvious target of the Russian bombing, the nine-story presidential headquarters from which Dudayev runs the republic, remained untouched.

The former Soviet bomber pilot, who spent Saturday night in the building, said Yeltsin was afraid to attack him, because if he did, “then I’d have the right to bomb the Kremlin.”

“We avenge ourselves,” Dudayev said. “We’re patient. One day, two, three, a year passes, but vengeance is inevitable.”

The Chechens are known as a fierce people with a penchant for organized crime and a powerful tradition of clans and blood feuds. They have battled the Russians since the 18th Century. In 1991, Dudayev came to power and declared Chechnya’s independence, beginning a new cycle of conflict with the Kremlin.

On-and-off negotiations between Moscow and Grozny have repeatedly broken down, and the Kremlin resorted to covertly supporting a Chechen opposition group that tried to storm Grozny last month and failed miserably, leaving tanks and weapons to Dudayev’s victorious forces.

Dudayev claimed Sunday that suicide soldiers have disabled 12 Russian tanks by throwing themselves beneath them and setting off grenades.

Despite the Chechens’ spirited resistance, some military specialists said they expected a ground assault aimed at seizing control of Grozny--if only to avoid a demoralizing retreat by the Russian army from Chechnya and possibly the entire Caucasus region. Russian officials emphasized that no such order had been given.

“The city will be stormed, and soon,” predicted Pavel Felgengauer, the well-informed defense correspondent of the Moscow newspaper Sevodnya. “Of course, they will try to act with a scalpel and not with an ax. High-precision weapons will be used.”

Sergei A. Filatov, Yeltsin’s chief of staff, warned reporters in Moscow not to expect a sweeping advance.

“I would like to avoid words like storming , assault and combat operations ,” he said. “What we are talking about is the suppression of gun emplacements, spots of resistance, military hardware depots. This is not a war. This can be called special operations.”

Guarded by more than two dozen soldiers spread along the hallways that lead to his bunker, Dudayev looked relatively fresh for a man who had spent the previous night anticipating an attack--and was still expecting one.

He spoke in measured, dramatic tones. His jutting cheekbones, dark eyes and trimmed mustache gave him the look of a movie actor of the 1920s, but his words flirted with the bounds of sanity.

He accused Russia of “blasphemy, cynicism, vandalism and barbarism” and warned that “if this policy of satanism continues, Russia will condemn itself to its own death.”

Times staff writer Richard Boudreaux contributed to this report from Moscow.