Russia Steps Up Bombing Near Chechen Capital : Caucasus: Kremlin ignores new appeal for talks. Separatist army asks neighboring republics for aid.

Russian troops edged toward the capital of breakaway Chechnya and pounded its outskirts with almost continuous bombing Monday in a sharply escalating assault on the heavily armed republic as it pressed its bid for independence. Some bombs struck near the city center.

In the 24 hours after Chechen President Dzhokar M. Dudayev spurned Moscow’s last offer of peace talks Sunday evening, the thunder of artillery and the crunch of bombs audible in Grozny, the Chechen capital, grew from an occasional explosion to regular booming.

Dudayev issued a terse new appeal for peace talks, but the Kremlin ignored it. As the mighty Russian army and this tiny Muslim republic braced for intense combat, the Chechen military command appealed to neighboring republics in the Caucasus Mountains to “rise up and repel the aggressor.”

One armored column pushed to within five miles of Grozny from the north after capturing the armed village of Petropavlovskaya, while a second column was bogged down in tank and small-arms battles in Dolinskoye on the city’s western outskirts.

As a heavy snow blanketed this oil-refining city, it was not clear whether those troops had received orders to move in for what would certainly be a caldron of urban guerrilla warfare.

But after deliberately sparing Grozny’s 200,000 people from air assaults, warplanes swooped low over the city Monday night and dropped at least two bombs, briefly knocking Chechen television off the air, setting four houses ablaze and destroying at least six others.

Hospital officials said two people were killed and eight injured.

Scattered bombs and artillery began falling on Grozny’s outskirts early Sunday within minutes after the Kremlin’s midnight deadline for the surrender of Dudayev’s several-thousand-strong irregular forces.

Russian officials in Moscow said Sunday’s shelling crippled 16 rebel tanks and armored personnel carriers, five aircraft, two artillery guns, a missile launcher and an ammunition depot.

Warplanes and artillery also targeted Dudayev’s family compound in the suburb of Tashkala and Grozny’s electricity plant Sunday but missed. Instead, they scored direct hits on such objects as the muddy back yard of pensioner Yevgenya Pogosian.

“They don’t know where they’re shooting,” said Pogosian’s neighbor, Tamara Idriseva, whose two-story home had the post-earthquake look of shattered windows and cracked ceilings. “They should just fight among themselves. They should leave us alone.”

Pogosian’s home, where she had lived since 1984, was broken open like a dollhouse. Although Moscow has said it was not targeting civilian sites, the general fear that Russian raids have sown among Chechnya’s population also had a tactical effect.

“What could be more strategic than demoralizing the people?” asked Musa Mirzhuyev, Dudayev’s liaison with the Chechen armed forces.

He said Russia’s military aim was clearly the conquest of Grozny but warned that even if the capital falls to Moscow’s superior might, that will not be the end of the war.

“Classical military thinking says that once you capture the capital, the war is over,” Mirzhuyev said. “But the Chechens have fought Russia for 300 years, and we don’t plan to sign any surrender.”

Russian military analysts have predicted that Moscow will use special commandos in a pinpoint operation against Dudayev’s nine-story presidential palace in central Grozny.

But Mirzhuyev scoffed, “The Russian empire never was capable of using a scalpel--it always barged into other people’s gardens with a bear’s paws.”

The Russian escalation, launched after a government decision to “activize” its operations in Chechnya, was formally aimed at disarming Dudayev’s forces, which the Kremlin refers to as “illegal armed bands” and “bandit formations.”

But the Russian troops that poured into Chechnya on Dec. 11 had a clearly political goal: to bring the breakaway republic of about 1.2 million people to heel and break its bid for independence once and for all.

Chechnya broke away from Russia in November, 1991, and played a dangerous game of brinkmanship with the Kremlin for the next three years--until Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s patience ended and he instructed his Cabinet to do whatever it took to impose Moscow’s control in the North Caucasus republic.

The mass entry of troops, Moscow’s biggest military operation since the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, has united most of the Russian political spectrum and public opinion against Yeltsin.

On Monday, Lt. Gen. Valery Vostrokin, an Afghan War veteran who is Yeltsin’s deputy minister for emergency situations, joined in urging the president to call off the Chechnya campaign.

“To be the aggressor, a policeman on our own territory is not a good job for the military,” Vostrokin told reporters in the Caucasus republic of Ingushetia, where he was coordinating relief efforts for an estimated 100,000 refugees from Chechnya.

“I think it is possible to solve this problem by taking out the troops and letting Chechnya solve its own problems,” he added.

In Moscow, authorities prepared for possible retaliatory strikes by Chechen guerrillas by parking armored personnel carriers along Moscow’s six-lane outer Ring Highway to reinforce police checkpoints.

The offensive in Chechnya hit major snags at first when people in neighboring Caucasus states tried to block the passage of Russia’s armored columns toward Chechnya’s borders. One Russian column bogged down inside Chechnya when its commander refused to advance if that meant clashing with civilians.

But by Monday night, Russian troops were closing in on Grozny from the north and west. Grozny residents, already weary from repeated nights of sleep broken by the thumps of bombing, had been informed of the locations of the nearest air-raid shelters. Some were already spending the nights in their basements.

At Dudayev’s presidential headquarters, whole sides of beef and giant bags of onions along with the usual rows of bread loaves were stacked in the downstairs lobby, ready for a siege.

One defender of the headquarters said Dudayev had run out of guns to give his soldiers.

Dudayev is known to possess several Russian tanks captured in an attempted storming of Grozny on Nov. 26 by anti-Dudayev Chechen forces backed by Russian troops and planes. The Chechens are also reported to have large arsenals taken over after the Soviet army fell apart.

But the typical Chechen unit probably resembles the small squad of bearded, red-eyed men sitting around a smoking campfire Monday 10 miles east of Grozny in the hamlet of Shaami-Yurt.

Armed with a grenade launcher along with their personal semiautomatics, the Chechen fighters had finished digging their trenches and turned to the more pleasant task of boiling a caldron of lamb meat.

They had no official ranks, said Khusan Isabayev, the 34-year-old commander. And the squad had no real name or number except for its classification as a scouting and diversionary unit.

For the last two weeks, they had been guarding this stretch of the Moscow-Baku road and had managed to shoot down a Russian helicopter.

What bothered them most, Isabayev said, was that Russian planes and helicopters would fly over them and go on to bomb people’s houses in neighboring villages instead of engaging head-on.

“The military site is here,” he said. “Kill me, OK? But they send rockets and kill the villagers. They killed four people here.”

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