Russians Stalled as Chechen Fighters Pour Into Capital : Caucasus: Rebels set tanks on fire and claim to have 100 prisoners. Kremlin press center admits to complications but says its units control entire city center.

The Kremlin’s forces bogged down in an urban battlefield Sunday as guerrillas inside the rebel capital of Chechnya set Russian tanks ablaze and claimed to have captured 100 enemy soldiers.

As New Year’s Day television programs showed the mangled corpses of Russian soldiers strewn along Grozny’s streets, the official government press center admitted that its military position had “become more complicated over the last 24 hours.”

But Defense Minister Pavel S. Grachev insisted that the Russian forces are in control of the entire city center, as well as several suburban areas. Grachev said that the palace that has been the headquarters of Chechen President Dzhokar M. Dudayev is now blockaded but that skirmishes continue nearby.

Thousands of fresh Chechen fighters poured into Grozny from the countryside intent on beating back the Russian forces moving inexorably to crush this mainly Muslim republic’s 3-year-old declaration of independence.

The volunteer Chechen reinforcements, jammed onto open flatbed trucks along the last open highway into Grozny, augured a long and costly combat in Chechnya. Many shouted “Allah is great” as their trucks rolled past.

Russian tanks and troops had launched an attack on central Grozny on New Year’s Eve, enveloping the area in a hellish firefight and occupying several key buildings.

But as the war in Chechnya entered its third week Sunday, it was clear that winning would not be so easy.

Before Russia began pouring tens of thousands of troops into this breakaway southern republic of 1.2 million people, Grachev had boasted that a Russian paratrooper division could subdue Grozny in a day. On Sunday night, he said it would take five or six days to “cleanse the city of gangs.”

He blamed foreign mercenaries fighting alongside the Chechens, saying they are “highly professional” but “extremely cruel toward civilians.”

Chechen soldiers paraded several captured Russian tanks through the streets and said they had taken 100 prisoners. They claimed that Russian troops had been largely beaten back to the city’s outskirts.

Several gutted Russian tanks could be seen burning near Grozny’s railroad station, and the thunder and lightning of heavy fighting continued near the presidential palace.

“The New Year was celebrated in Grozny by fireworks made of Russian tanks,” the “Itogi” television program reported, showing a blazing hulk shooting sparks into the smoky night.

“Itogi” said Russian tank columns, cut off from infantry support, have fallen into a classic trap in the city. It said Russian troops are at a disadvantage fighting in a city “where every basement window is a gun port and every third resident has a Kalashnikov and a grenade launcher.”

In startling footage, a rifle-toting Chechen commando was seen hiding in the shadows of a building just yards from a Russian tank rolling past the presidential palace.

The program went on to skewer Grachev by airing month-old footage of the defense minister declaring, “Only an incompetent commander would use tanks in a city.”

“A 12-year-old youth with a bottle of gasoline in hand can at any moment terminate the lives of four Russian soldiers maddened from fighting in an armored vehicle,” said “Itogi” host Yevgeny Kiselev. “And then a tank becomes a grave.”

Much of the male population of Chechnya seemed headed to Grozny to back up its defenders in response to a televised call to arms from the Chechen leadership.

Many of the men who were crammed into trucks and vans lacked weapons, but that did not stop their headlong rush to the front lines.

“They have no arms, but they have spirit, and Allah is with us,” said Israel Abdullakhadjiev, a Chechen intelligence officer who was overseeing one truck’s progress. He said the 40 villagers on his truck would be issued arms in Grozny.

Despite heavy fog, Russian aircraft continued to bomb Chechen villages and targets--some military, some residential--in Grozny. Artillery boomed throughout the day.

In the southern Grozny district of Oktyabrsky, the streets were almost deserted except for group after group of young men sporting Kalashnikov rifles, grenades and daggers.

“I only have this to fight with,” said 22-year-old Jambulat Sulimanov, patting the pocket that held his Makharov pistol. “But I’ll fight to the end.”

Sulimanov, who had just come from the presidential palace, said that Russian soldiers had moved in Saturday night with tanks and taken up position just off Grozny’s central square.

He said the Russians had begun sniping at Chechen militants from that post and other positions around the city.

Grozny, a large Soviet-style metropolis that is normally home to 400,000 people, presents an extremely difficult military problem for the Russian troops charged with subduing an implacably hostile population.

Even if the Russian forces take the presidential palace--the equivalent of capturing the flag in a war game--the conflict will almost certainly continue.

Dudayev’s forces have vowed, with the stubborn fierceness that Chechens are known for, that they will never surrender to Moscow. If they are defeated in the city, they say, they will take their battle to the hills and wage tactical guerrilla warfare against any government that Moscow installs.

In the meantime, however, it was not clear who has the upper hand in Grozny. Chechen forces said they were on a “hunt for Russian tanks and soldiers,” tracking down the Russian armor and knocking it out.

The Chechens claimed that the city is fully in their control except for two or three pockets of Russian troops and tanks, while Moscow claimed just the reverse.

But the Russian firepower so outweighs the Chechen resources that it appeared that blasts in the center and bombing in the villages mean the slow but unstoppable destruction of Dudayev’s forces.

Only one thing is clear, said Sergei A. Kovalev, President Boris N. Yeltsin’s top human rights adviser: The cost to human life is already great.

“The victims number in the hundreds, victims from both sides,” said Kovalev, the former Soviet dissident who has become Russia’s most eloquent anti-war activist. “I can only say that if the palace and the city in general are taken, there will be thousands of victims.”

The Russian press center said that Dudayev has fled the bunker underneath the presidential palace where he had been holed up along with Kovalev and other Russian lawmakers. The former Soviet bomber pilot was now reported to be hiding in another bunker in a Grozny suburb and was losing radio contact with some of his field commanders, according to Russian military intelligence.

The press center said Russian forces control the Lenin oil refinery complex that has been on fire since an alleged Russian bombing strike Thursday. Most of the oil fires, which Moscow claims were deliberately set by the Chechens, have burned themselves out, and the rest have been extinguished, it said.

Russian commanders in Grozny and in Mozdok in North Ossetia also claimed that Dudayev’s forces are using homemade chemical weapons. The report could not be confirmed Sunday.

They alleged that Chechen commandos set underground mines that contained 88-pound canisters of explosive chlorine and detonated them with radio signals, killing advancing Russian soldiers as well as civilians. Chechen militants also allegedly poured poisonous hydrocyanic acid across highways, the Russian press center said.

Russians have begun comparing the crackdown in Chechnya to the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, saying that if Dudayev is captured, he will be tried as an ordinary criminal, just as the United States prosecuted Gen. Manuel A. Noriega on drug-trafficking charges after ousting the Panamanian strongman.

Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev defended the Chechnya intervention Sunday on CNN, saying that a U.S. President confronted with a “regional gang” would do exactly what Yeltsin has done.

“There is no other way but to use force to reinstall law and order and to rescue the population from criminal gangs,” Kozyrev said.

But in Washington, incoming Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) said that Russian democracy and U.S. assistance to that democracy may be jeopardized by the growing violence in Chechnya.

“This is a no-win situation for Yeltsin,” he said on the CBS program “Face the Nation.” “It’s an indication that democracy may be on the brink.”

Dole said that the American people and Congress are dismayed by the use of force in Chechnya and that the Senate would re-examine the wisdom of supplying additional aid to the Yeltsin government, the Associated Press reported.

Goldberg reported from Grozny, Efron from Moscow.