Russian Unit Rescues 18 Hostages in Dagestan : Caucasus: Government forces finally score a success in restive region. But tensions remain.

Paramilitary troops stormed a bus where gunmen were holding 18 people hostage in the volatile Caucasus on Thursday, freeing the captives, seizing the perpetrators and rectifying somewhat the image of Russia’s anti-terrorist forces as bunglers.

But the tense, daylong standoff in the republic of Dagestan, and several new incidents of insurgency in neighboring Chechnya, have served to remind the Kremlin of its unresolved conflicts with the restless regions of Russia’s southern fringes.

Now that a clash with Western nations over Bosnia policy has subsided with the suspension of NATO bombings, Russian domestic crises fed by independence movements and the government’s attempts to quash them have again asserted themselves.

Authorities said the gunmen, who were demanding $1.5 million and a helicopter, probably intended to flee to Chechnya. The hijackers told police negotiators that their demands were not political and that they needed the money to help friends who were addicted to drugs.

Federal authorities made no immediate connection between the hostage-taking in the Dagestani capital of Makhachkala and the rekindled tensions in Chechnya, but it fit into a pattern of terrorist acts that have racked the Caucasus region since Russian forces attacked Chechen rebels in December.

A day after an assassination attempt against President Boris N. Yeltsin’s special envoy in the Chechen capital, Grozny, another suspicious explosion rocked the shattered city’s oil refinery, and two Russian soldiers were taken captive by rebel gunmen, Russian media reported.

The series of incidents compelled Moscow to recognize that its July agreement with rebels loyal to Chechen President Dzhokar M. Dudayev is at risk of collapse. Few of the military disengagement terms have been complied with, and the warring factions have made no progress since then on the more contentious political issues.

Federal officials and Dudayev loyalists have been trading threats to resume fighting over the past two weeks, with Moscow vowing to halt troop withdrawals from the region until all Chechen fighters are disarmed. The July 30 agreement to end what was then a 7-month-old war called for rebel disarmament and federal troop reductions to be completed by now.

More than two dozen Russian soldiers have been killed in the past three weeks. After a bomb attack Wednesday on a Grozny bridge narrowly missed presidential envoy Oleg I. Lobov, a meeting of the top federal and rebel commanders was convened by international mediators in an attempt to get the peace process back on track.

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What was at best a tense and tentative peace in Chechnya unraveled slowly over the past few weeks, while Kremlin officials and parliamentary opponents were absorbed in a campaign of rhetoric against NATO countries for launching air strikes against Bosnian Serbs, with whom Russians share a Slavic heritage and the Christian Orthodox religion.

Although Wednesday’s cancellation of the air strikes eased the strain between Moscow and Washington, it has allowed public attention here to return to the Chechen crisis, reminding Russians of their vulnerability to terrorism.

A June hostage crisis in Budennovsk, in which 140 people were killed when Chechen guerrillas stormed the Russian town and took 1,000 captives, triggered a leadership crisis and prompted Yeltsin to fire several top security officials.

Thursday’s hostage drama ended with Interior Ministry commandos subduing the gunmen without serious injury to the captives.