Russia Planes Continue Attacks on Grozny : Chechnya: The fifth straight day of bombing coincides with the anniversary of Moscow’s Afghan invasion.

Moscow’s warplanes struck the devastated capital of Chechnya on Saturday as Russians marked the 15th anniversary of another invasion that scarred and divided the nation--the war in Afghanistan.

“You can see the shadow of the Afghan War in Chechnya,” Izvestia columnist Teimuraz Mamaladze wrote.

As Russian warplanes bombed Grozny, the capital of the breakaway Chechen republic, for the fifth straight day, Russian ground forces appeared to be tightening their noose around the city.

Nine miles east of Grozny, Russian artillery pounded the town of Argun as terrified residents tried to salvage belongings from their devastated homes.

As his capital lay in ruins, Chechen President Dzhokar M. Dudayev told Associated Press Television that “no army in the world, no military force, could carry out the Russian government’s objective to break the spirit and freedom of the Chechen people.

“It is our genetic trait given by God,” he said. “It is impossible.”

Dudayev sat at a desk in a basement office in the presidential palace in Grozny illuminated by a single candle. Above were empty corridors, empty rooms and shattered glass. The palace was deserted except for guards outside.

The Russian government continued to insist it was hitting military targets. The media continued to defy its efforts at spin control.

Newspapers were both angry and elegiac as they compared the invasion of Chechnya, a small, mostly Muslim region of southern Russia, to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which Moscow occupied for 10 years.

“Newspapers started writing the truth about the Afghan War 10 years after it started,” the daily Moskovsky Komsomolets said. “As for Chechnya, there is a chance to write the truth right now.”

Izvestia disagreed: “We didn’t know the truth then. We don’t know the truth now.”

But, it added, “in 1979 people kept silent, hiding their tears. Today nobody hides their feelings about the events in Chechnya.”

The Kremlin says it is fighting to keep the Russian Federation together. But the invasion is fiercely unpopular. Even President Boris N. Yeltsin’s staunch allies bitterly criticize the brutal attempt to crush Chechnya’s independence.

Chechen officials say hundreds of people have died since Russia invaded Dec. 11.

Saturday’s pre-dawn air strikes destroyed several buildings in Grozny, television crews returning from the battered city said. Among the buildings reduced to burning rubble was the city’s main toy store, Children’s World.

There was no information on casualties. But at midday, bodies still lay on the streets. An old woman sat weeping outside the ruins of her home, the bodies of her son and his wife still trapped inside.

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Russian troops have been moving toward the rebel capital from the west and south, but Chechen resistance remained stubborn. Russia’s Independent Television reported Saturday that more troops were heading for Chechnya.

An aide said Yeltsin, who underwent nose surgery Dec. 10, plans to spend several more days recuperating at his dacha outside Moscow.

Yeltsin was, however, planning to confer Monday with his Security Council, a driving force behind the Chechen war.