Russians Give Up on Hostages, Shell Chechens

Having abandoned hope of saving hostages held by armed Chechen separatists, Russian forces indiscriminately rocketed this village Wednesday in defiance of terrorists’ threats to blow up a packed Black Sea ferry unless the assault ends.

The fiercest bombardment yet in a campaign to flush Chechen rebels from Pervomayskaya and end an embarrassing incident that has traumatized Russia for nine days made it clear that the Kremlin has no intention of bargaining with the Chechens for the lives of their captives.

On the contrary, Russian officials here and in Moscow acknowledged that they have no expectations of finding survivors from among the more than 100 captives grabbed by the Chechens in the town of Kizlyar on Jan. 9 and shuttled here in a foiled escape plan.

Despite Wednesday’s dawn-to-dusk battery--a quartet of Mi-24 helicopters and fearsome Grad multiple-rocket launchers--a group of Chechen fighters early today seized neighboring Sovetskaya and were reportedly moving down the road toward the village of Terechnoye. It appeared that the commandos were reinforcements from Chechnya who had crossed the poorly guarded border. It was unknown whether they took any new hostages.

The guerrillas’ move caused panic among those residents of Sovetskaya who hadn’t already been evacuated.

Hundreds of villagers could be seen huddled on a nearby road in the dead of night with no transportation out of the area. Many crouched in trenches by the roadside in fear of stray gunfire. Some said they grabbed their coats and ran when the separatists arrived in the town about 2:30 a.m.

The villagers said that they then heard a large gun battle between federal troops and the incoming Chechen fighters and that the Russians had apparently retreated.

The Russians’ decision to bombard Pervomayskaya on Wednesday was unmistakably a rejection of the demands of other Chechen gunmen in Turkey who hijacked the passenger ferry Avraziya on Tuesday to gain leverage in what has become an international hostage crisis.

Six gunmen led by Muhammad Tokcan, a Turkish citizen of Abkhaz descent who has joined the year-old guerrilla war for Chechnya’s independence, seized the Russian vessel as it was about to leave the Turkish port of Trabzon with 144 passengers and 55 crew members. They say they have wired the ferry with explosives.

Another Chechen guerrilla unit has been blamed for the kidnapping and disappearance early Tuesday of 29 power-station workers near Grozny, the Chechen capital now occupied by Russian federal forces. Their whereabouts were still unknown.

On Wednesday, as the ferry from Trabzon steamed slowly westward toward Istanbul, the gunmen threatened to blow it up in the Bosporus Strait, with Russian passengers aboard, unless Russian forces stop their assault on Pervomayskaya. They said they would free Turkish passengers first.

But Turkish news reports indicated that Turkish authorities had struck a deal allowing the hijackers to hold a news conference when they arrive in Istanbul and then go free, as long as they cause no harm. The vessel is due in Istanbul today.

Most of the passengers are Russian retail merchants who buy in Turkey and sell in Russia.

The hijackers and the ferry captain, in radio contact with trailing Turkish coast guard cutters, denied an earlier report that one person aboard had been killed. The only casualty was a Turkish port official slightly wounded in the foot.

Russian officials made clear that they will not negotiate with the hijackers.

Instead, Russia’s ambassador to Turkey, Vadim Kuznetsov, said he called on Turkish authorities “to take the most energetic measures to free the hostages unhurt, stop the actions of the terrorists and punish them.”

“The crafty action in Trabzon proves the ruinous nature of the policy of pacification of the terrorists,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Grigory Karasin said.

The Clinton administration has condemned the Chechen attacks but expressed concern that Russia’s use of heavy artillery in Pervomayskaya could deepen the conflict in Chechnya.

U.S. Defense Secretary William J. Perry said Wednesday that Russia was correct to take “strong action” in response to the hostage crisis, but said the U.S. military would have launched a “surgical operation rather than the massive frontal use of force.”

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin has severely hardened his approach to the Chechen crisis, spurred by his December 1994 attack on the breakaway republic.

Yeltsin has vowed to destroy the rebels, who negotiated their way to freedom in a similar June hostage incident only to strike again in this neighboring region of southern Russia.

Since launching their ferocious onslaught against the Chechen holdouts early Wednesday, Russian government troops have made clear that their first priority is wiping out the gunmen loyal to Chechen leader Dzhokar M. Dudayev.

Russian officers have referred to the assault as a liberation effort. But imprecise tank and mortar rounds fired by the thousands into Pervomayskaya’s smoldering center have left most observers believing that most of the hostages have perished.

Russian troops returning from the battlefield have said the Chechens used a six-day delay before the government offensive to dig an intricate network of foxholes and tunnels that have frustrated Russian infantry attempts to close in on the gunmen.

The hostages, on the other hand, have been kept in more exposed venues, such as attics and the village schoolhouse, according to some of about 20 people who managed to escape in the confusion.

A senior Russian military spokesman confirmed that the Kremlin had given up efforts to rescue the hostages and turned the full fury of its nearly 10,000 troops and its cordon of armor around Pervomayskaya toward annihilating the Chechens.

“It has become clear the bandits have executed the hostages on Dudayev’s order and have been told to leave the blockaded zone as there is no hope of reinforcement,” claimed Alexander G. Mikhailov, information chief for the Federal Security Service, which is directing the operation here.

“The terrorists have failed to answer many requests to lay down their arms and free the hostages,” Mikhailov told journalists behind the battle lines. “We have therefore decided to conclude the operation.”

Round after round of heavy artillery blasted the charred landscape of this border post, which was home to nearly 900 people before the Chechens arrived with their captives. The hostages were seized in Kizlyar and held aboard a fleeing bus convoy that was eventually halted by federal gunfire.

By nightfall Wednesday, flames engulfed village houses and cattle sheds, casting an orange glow across a pall of smoke floating across the flat horizon of this desolate farming region in the Russian republic of Dagestan.

Despite the punishing assault, Russian forces were unable to capture the smoldering ruins of the village.

Each time the circling helicopters held fire and swept low to examine the target, antiaircraft fire rose from the besieged town.

The bombing continued until nightfall, and a steady rainfall of flares illuminated the destruction as ground-launched rocketing continued through the night.

One officer leaving the battle scene along a muddy road linking Pervomayskaya with Sovetskaya told journalists that the battle scene in the village was “a nightmare.”

He said one unit of paratroopers had been lured into the village and then had been ambushed by the Chechens in a clash that he said resulted “in many corpses.”

Official reports on casualties have varied widely, and federal authorities appeared to be understating their own losses.

Mikhailov said six government troops had been killed in the fighting, while Russian media quoted Interior Ministry sources reporting 18 dead and 60 wounded.

The International Commission of the Red Cross asked federal authorities Tuesday to hold fire for two or three hours so they could evacuate dead and wounded, but there was still no government response, the evening news program “Vesti” reported.

Times staff writer Richard Boudreaux in Moscow and Times special correspondent Hugh Pope in Istanbul contributed to this report.