Russians Open Fire on Chechen Terrorists

Russian forces opened a massive artillery assault this morning in a long-delayed campaign to roust Chechen terrorists holding as many as 200 captives.

After six days of menacing maneuvers, the federal forces fired repeated heavy artillery barrages from their tanks encircling this village in the southern republic of Dagestan.

The assault at 9 a.m. local time began one hour ahead of a revised deadline for the Chechen rebels to surrender their hostages or face a punishing attack by the arsenal of 10,000 Russian troops that have surrounded the village of Pervomayskaya for nearly a week.

As the raid was launched, the Russian Interior Ministry said it had intercepted radio communications between the local Chechen leader, Salman Raduyev, and his president-in-hiding, Dzhokar M. Dudayev. According to the Interior Ministry, Dudayev told Raduyev to prepare his men to die as kamikazes. He also ordered them to kill the police officers among their hostages.

“Consider yourselves kamikazes. Be ready to meet Allah. Forget about everything earthly and it will be easier for you. Prepare for the worst,” Dudayev reportedly told Raduyev.

Russian Maj. Gen. Alexander Mikhailov told reporters that the gunmen had rejected a request to lay down their arms and had started killing hostages on Sunday afternoon. But the report could not be independently confirmed.

With the attack, the Russians made good on their promise to punish the rebels for raiding a small Dagestani town last week and seizing men, women and children.

Shortly before the raid, the Russians had tried to break the stalemate with psychological pressure. They prepared to blare warnings in the Chechen language urging the terrorists to surrender their arms and turn over their captives immediately.

“You are in a situation with no way out,” the announcements said, according to Mikhailov. “Federal forces surround you on all sides. Your lives are in your very own hands.”

Before the raid began, the Russians had let two deadlines slip for the rebels to surrender. The indecisiveness of the government had angered many of the 10,000 federal soldiers deployed around the village and raised the prospect of a long and frustrating standoff.

Moscow had initially given the Chechen guerrillas until 10 a.m. Sunday to release their captives and give up their weapons or face a punishing assault by the forces that had them encircled.

As darkness fell Sunday across fields bristling with weapons, the Russians announced that they would give the Chechens one more night to think over their demands.

The tension escalated after sundown with a report from a Russian Interior Ministry official that the rebels had opened fire on the troops, wounding four, a report quickly denied by other officials.

Earlier Sunday, tanks and troops that had been closing in on Pervomayskaya pulled back. Many of the Russian soldiers boarded buses to regather at checkpoints up to three miles away.

Interior Minister Anatoly S. Kulikov, head of the security forces deployed here and a former commander of Russian troops fighting in nearby Chechnya, was reported to be heading for the hostage scene to direct the operation.

But the summoning of Kulikov and the so-far-ineffectual intervention of Col. Gen. Mikhail I. Barsukov, the director of the Russian Federal Security Service, seemed only to add to the frustration of those officers trying to carry out a liberation scheme.

“There are too many commanders involved, and none of them wants to take responsibility for what is going to happen,” one major groused after his unit was ordered back from the hostage scene.

Other officers deployed to the frozen fields of this Dagestani backwater argued that storming the Chechen nest was becoming only more difficult as time passed. They also said they expected to become scapegoats for any civilian deaths in the tense hostage standoff that is a consequence of the Kremlin’s bitter and unfinished war against secessionist Chechnya.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin sent troops to quash the republic’s independence bid in December 1994, but the deadly and protracted conflict has devastated his image among both Western statesmen and Russians weary of military adventures costing the lives of their sons.

The nearly vanquished Chechens loyal to Dudayev have retaliated against the invasion by staging terrorist attacks in other regions of Russia--the latest in this autonomous republic that lies between Chechnya and the Caspian Sea.

Hundreds of Chechen gunmen raided the northern Dagestani town of Kizlyar on Tuesday, grabbing as many as 3,000 hostages to use as leverage to force the federal government in Moscow to end its armed suppression of Chechnya. Local Dagestani authorities provided the terrorists with buses and promises of safe passage to their homeland in exchange for the captives’ freedom.

The Chechens left Kizlyar with more than 100 hostages as insurance and grabbed more after they were blocked by Russian troops in this border village within sight of Chechnya.

Captives were forced off the buses and billeted by the Chechen gunmen throughout the village to make a Russian strike more difficult and costly.

On Sunday, Chechen militants sympathetic to the hostage-holding band reportedly massed near the Chechen capital of Grozny. Russian authorities suggested that the fighters were planning a diversionary attack on a hospital or airfield in Grozny.

Alexander Zdanovich, a spokesman for the Federal Security Service, told the Itar-Tass news agency that he expected a raid in Grozny. He said, however, that vulnerable sites are well guarded. And he vowed that the “bandits will be mercilessly destroyed” if they launch an attack.

Zdanovich cited credible sources in describing the advance on Grozny. But Interior Ministry officials noted that Chechen militants have proved masters of disinformation.

Dagestani elders from the regional capital of Makhachkala had been mediating between the Chechen captors and Russian forces since the Dagestani standoff began but were rebuffed Sunday afternoon when they sought to propose a new plan for the hostages’ release.

“They would not even let us enter the village,” Magomed Khachilayev, an elder of the Dagestan People’s Council, said as he returned through the cordon that Russian troops had erected around the hostage scene. “I can no longer see any scenario for a positive resolution.”

Late Sunday, Yeltsin personally took a telephone call from another Dagestani elder, who pleaded with him to hold off on military action at least until the hostages were freed, Itar-Tass reported.

The Chechen gunmen had repeatedly threatened to begin shooting their captives unless Moscow allowed them unhindered passage to Chechnya with the hostages along as human shields.

By refusing to meet with the Dagestani delegation, the Chechens under the command of guerrilla leader Raduyev had signaled their intention to hold out for a government retreat rather than give up either their weapons or their civilian pawns.

But the political costs of letting the Chechens escape after killing at least 20 people in Kizlyar and more than 150 in a similar incident in Budennovsk in June would have been devastating for Yeltsin. He is already under fire from opponents for failing to root out the insurgents who have terrorized all of Russia.

Most of the Russian troops seemed to expect an eventual order to attack the captives and had been chafing under the repeated delays.

Power was cut to this village and the neighboring hamlet of Sovetskaya, one possible sign that the surrounding federal forces were planning an assault.

Times staff writer Stephanie Simon in Moscow contributed to this report.