In Chechnya’s Capital, ‘Pure Terror’ Continues : Russia: Moscow’s forces claim victory is at hand. Yet merciless combat has reduced the city’s center to ruins.

With horror comes a kind of fog.

The few civilians left Sunday among the ruins of this Chechen capital’s center seemed to be sleepwalking through a strange nightmare in which every store, every school, every home they once frequented has turned into a charred wreck. They wore white armbands in hopes of fending off snipers.

The Russian soldiers being treated in the bomb shelter at the city’s main hospital could barely remember what they had been doing for the past month, where they were wounded and how so many of their comrades had died. They knew only one thing:

“This is not a city. It’s pure terror,” said a blank-eyed paratrooper whose lips were coated with a thin crust of blood. He arrived in Chechnya last month with 120 fellow fighters--of whom only six now remain, he said.

Despite all the Russian reports of impending victory, the battle for Grozny is still going full force. Artillery and automatic-weapons fire boom and sputter through the area that the Russians were supposed to have taken days ago. But conquered areas here do not stay conquered, and victory lasts only until the next Chechen counterattack.

The Russians with their superior firepower must ultimately win, but it is becoming ever clearer that by the time they actually take the last block of Grozny they will be raising their flag over little more than a pile of ashes.

In the area around the central Republican Hospital, not a house is left intact, not a pane of glass is to be seen. Brick walls have crumbled into piles, concrete walls gape with the crude holes left by shelling, trees stand denuded and blackened. High-rise apartment buildings have been bombed beyond any hope of repair. Some were still smoking as the descending whistle of shells played on.

Armored cars and tanks have churned the streets into swamps of mud thigh-high in places. The presidential palace, the 10-story edifice seen as the symbol of the rebel Chechen regime and the initial focus of the battle for Grozny, has been nearly leveled, Russian and Chechen soldiers said.

Looting has become shameless as this oil-industry metropolis that once held 400,000 people has degenerated into what Russians call bezpredel --no limits, free-for-all. Residents push wheelbarrows through the streets filled with what they can scavenge. Plaintive signs reading “People live here” hang on some gates to discourage thieves.

“There is terrible robbery going on in the city,” said Nikolai Khlusov, a 75-year-old Russian who wore a bandage around an arm that took a sniper’s bullet when he ventured out of his basement. “Everyone takes part in it.”

Khlusov and his wife gather water from the roof eaves, or “As God sends it”--however they can. His daughter stays with them because her apartment building was shelled and burned to the ground. He can no longer quite say why he stays in Grozny despite chances to leave in refugee convoys. It almost seems to be out of guilt.

“This is a great tragedy that could have been avoided,” he said. “I blame everyone, including myself. Everyone gets the life that he deserves.”

Others, in their own fog, blame nobody.

Farman Shamsudinov, a Russian sergeant who oversees water deliveries to the hospital, said soldiers have been hit so often from buildings housing civilians that they have stopped caring whether innocent people are hurt in their firefights.

“We’ve even shot old people, we get so mean,” he said. “I know they’re not guilty of anything, but I’m not guilty either. This is a war nobody needs.”

It is a war that has sent a bustling Russian city back to the Stone Age and brought Russian soldiers to the point that they call both themselves and their Chechen opponents beasts.

“We just have to survive with dignity what we cannot change,” Khlusov said.

His old Soviet clothes exuded a mixed reek of wood smoke and the inability to wash thoroughly for weeks.

The thousands of Russian soldiers in Grozny truck in water from outside the city, but bathing is a luxury for them as well. The bathhouse they set up in the hospital complex has been bombed to smithereens twice.

The hospital area, a central Russian base packed with ammunition and high-level officers, is a special kind of hell the Russian soldiers have created for themselves.

Shamsudinov pointed at one spot in the mud tracks that make up the hospital yard and described how a lobbed mine had hit two soldiers straight on and killed them there. He pointed to another spot and said a shell had cut down a lieutenant colonel there as he stood talking to three other commanders.

Shamsudinov now carries a list of all the officers he knows have died. There are 28 of them.

“As soon as they let me out, I’m becoming a civilian,” he said.

By all accounts, the Chechen attacks on Russians in the city center have become less intense in recent days. Doctors at the hospital complex said they are taking in only about 10 wounded soldiers per day, compared to 50 or 60 at the height of the battles in the center two or three weeks ago.

“There were horrible, horrible battles here,” said Vladimir, a navy doctor from Russia’s Northern Fleet who refused to give his last name. “The Chechens act very mercilessly. It’s that kind of people.”

Merciless or not, the Chechens had the advantage of defending a city they knew inside and out while Russian troops struggled with barely a map.

“It’s impossible to fight in this city,” said Zhenya, a 19-year-old infantryman who was hit in the shoulder by machine-gun fire Friday. “We never know what the situation is. Yesterday, I saw a 15-year-old boy firing at us.”

Outside Grozny, the fighting has appeared to be spreading in recent days. Areas in eastern Chechnya that had appeared outside the conflict, like the town of Gudermes and the village of Vinogradnoye, have seen fierce battles. Russian soldiers manning posts along roads north of Grozny are repeatedly attacked at night by Chechens aiming to keep them sleepless or grab their weapons.

Chechen sources also say their fighters have managed to win back Grozny’s railroad station from the Russian troops who took it at the cost of dozens of Russian tanks and armored cars.

North of Grozny, where the Russian supply bases mainly lie, columns of armor and supply trucks have so multiplied that they were causing traffic jams on the mud roads Sunday. But Chechen fighters have also continued to find ways to get in and out of the city and replenish their supplies. They have fought on far longer and more effectively than expected from a nation of 1.2 million facing the whole Russian military machine, and some Chechens still insist they can win.