Russia Still Hammering at Chechnya : Caucasus: Renewed ground assault on capital follows devastating aerial bombardment. President reportedly flees city. Rebels vow to fight on.

The Kremlin’s tanks rolled into this devastated capital Sunday behind a holocaust of bombs, rockets and mortar fire the likes of which the battered city has not seen in the month since Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin sent thousands of troops to crush Chechen independence.

With Russian troops within 600 yards of his flaming palace, Chechen President Dzhokar M. Dudayev had reportedly fled to the city of Gudermes, 34 miles east of Grozny, the Russian government said. There was no confirmation, however, and previous Russian reports of Dudayev’s whereabouts have proved false.

Dudayev’s vastly outgunned fighters showed no signs of collapsing. They claimed to have rebuffed the first wave of the Russian ground assault, destroying 18 tanks that had moved into the city late Saturday afternoon.

A “Vesti” television correspondent reported from the Grozny railway station that Russian troops trapped in heavy fighting there for days said they had lost 11 or 12 pieces of heavy armor and that many Russian soldiers were shellshocked.

“What’s happened so far is just a scuffle,” said Lyomo Zubaerayev, a 27-year-old Chechen who carried a Kalashnikov rifle he bought for $370 two weeks ago with the last of his money. “Now we’re going to show them what Chechens are really made of.”

But the rebels, pinned down by the overwhelming aerial attack, had clearly lost ground.

The southern section of the city, which had so far been spared heavy fighting, was pummeled by rockets Sunday. The last open road leading out of the city was bombed. Broken gas pipelines flared like campfires beside crushed brick houses, and people grabbed their last possessions and joined the seemingly endless flow of refugees heading out of Grozny.

Chechen rebels continued to vow to fight the Russian invaders to the death, and it appeared Sunday that they may be forced to do just that.

“They can kill us all, but they can never conquer us,” Zubaerayev said. “No one has ever conquered us, though they’ve often tried to exterminate us.”

Russian artillery and jets also set afire the farming town of Argun, 10 miles east of Grozny, where shells were falling at a rate of 12 per minute at midday Sunday.

At dusk, the two cities could be seen glowing on the horizon.

“Yeltsin has now shown that he’s in control of nothing,” said a coldly furious Chechen who watched the bombs explode over Grozny despite the Russian president’s second promise to halt the aerial bombardment of the capital. “He’s a nobody. Now he’s just an old alcoholic.”

In a sign that Russia intends to continue its scorched-earth policy toward Chechnya, a helicopter flew over the southern village of Alkhazorovo on Sunday afternoon announcing that the local population had 48 hours to hand over captured Russian soldiers or their village would be bombed, according to residents of nearby settlements.

They said Russian paratroopers had dropped into the area at the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains a few days ago but were soon captured by local Chechens. They said, however, that the prisoners had been transferred to Grozny and were no longer theirs to free. That report too could not be confirmed.

Stunned by the violence of a Russian onslaught that has shown no mercy to civilians, many Chechens have begun wondering aloud why the international community, especially the United States, has not tried to curb the Kremlin’s wrath.

“Why is the entire civilized world silent?” asked Khasan V. Turkayev, a Grozny University professor of Chechen literature. “Why don’t America, Germany, France and Britain intervene to stop this massacre?

“I am not a politician, but I still think that America can influence Russia to stop this war,” Turkayev said.

In Washington, Vice President Al Gore said Sunday that he had personally warned Russian leaders during a visit to Moscow last month that it would be a “tragic mistake” to bomb the breakaway republic.

The Russians “believe that they tried negotiations for three years . . . and they felt as if they had come to the end of that road,” Gore said on the CBS program “Face the Nation.”

“I disagree with the decision. I told them personally before the bombing ever started that it would be in our view a terrible mistake.”

Nonetheless, congressional leaders from both Republican and Democratic parties said they are not ready to call for a reduction in foreign aid to Moscow.

“I wouldn’t be prepared to go that far,” Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), also on “Meet the Press,” added: “I don’t think we ought to punish the Russian people, but I do think it’s important the U.S. emphasize the need to respect human rights. . . . And they’re not being respected right now.”

Residents of embattled Grozny would agree. As Russian bomber jets screamed over the city Sunday, they found Auntie Valya trudging slowly down the street lugging two heavy pails of water.

At 74, she can no longer run.

Just when the planes swooped low over her rubble-strewn residential neighborhood, a Chechen rebel fired an automatic rifle up at the Russian jets. Everyone on the street dashed for cover, expecting the inevitable retaliatory strike--everyone except Valya, who stood like a hunched stone statue of inexpressible human despair.

Valya, who panted from fear and exertion as she struggled to reach her apartment amid the relentless booming of rockets that crashed into buildings a few blocks away from hers, said she did not even know whom to ask for help.

An ethnic Russian born in Grozny, Valentina G. Savelyeva--or Auntie Valya, as she is known in the neighborhood where she has lived all her life--said she had no money to pay anyone to take her out of the city, and no idea where she could go.

“I’m becoming senile, you know,” she said calmly. “I can’t travel. I’m running out of food. They used to give us bread for free, but now they don’t bring it anymore, and if they do, there’s never enough for everybody.”

Dozens of other dazed and frightened elderly people were also wandering the streets of Grozny. Most of them, ironically, were ethnic Russians who either had no relatives to help them or no way to send a message out of the city to have distant family members come fetch them.

Chechens said buses came around two weeks ago to collect women, children and old people but that many of the elderly residents least equipped to survive the siege of Grozny refused to go. As the bombardment reached a frenzied pitch, there was no sign of any attempt to evacuate them now.

“I can’t leave my house just like that,” said Polina P. Gardman, 61, a widow who lives with her husband’s 83-year-old mother. She shuddered as more artillery shells crashed nearby. “Of course, it is a bit frightening,” she said, beginning to cry.

Valya seemed to have no tears left. Her first husband died at the front during World War II, and her second husband died a long time ago, though she can no longer remember the year. Her only son was killed in a drunken brawl two years ago, and when the Russian government pension checks stopped coming, she was reduced to begging in the street.

Chechens have mostly been kind to her, she said, and someone recently brought her some potatoes. But she sits alone in her dirty, darkened apartment listening to the explosions, and nobody offers to help her carry water from the well more than half a mile away.

Her legs are numb, she said, stumbling over her words. Still, Valya is trying to hold on.

“I tried to use the water as sparingly as I could, but today I ran out and I had to get some more,” she said. “I wish I could carry two full buckets; then I wouldn’t have to go fetch it so often.

“If you could only imagine how hard it is,” Valya said, adding softly: “I have no one to complain to. If I stay here, they’ll definitely kill me. But where can I go? Nowhere. I have nowhere to go.”

Times staff writer Glenn F. Bunting in Washington contributed to this report.