Chechens Kill 26 Russians in Ambush

Separatists in Chechnya ambushed a column of Russian tanks and trucks, killing 26 soldiers and damaging President Boris N. Yeltsin’s effort to wind down the war by election day, Russian news media reported Wednesday.

The clash was the bloodiest since Yeltsin offered a peace plan for the unruly southern republic on March 31. It occurred as Russian troops were withdrawing late Tuesday from Shatoi, a mountain town in Chechnya abandoned earlier by separatist guerrillas.

Reports from Chechnya said at least 100 separatists hiding outside the town staged the ambush with grenade launchers and automatic rifles, destroying 23 of the convoy’s 27 vehicles and wounding 51 soldiers besides those who died.

Yeltsin’s 16-month-old war to prevent Chechnya’s secession is a major liability in his reelection campaign against Communist leader Gennady A. Zyuganov, front-runner on the June 16 ballot.

More than 20,000 people have died in the worst fighting in Russia since World War II.

Seeking to portray the ethnic war as an anti-terrorist action, Yeltsin took his campaign Wednesday to Budennovsk, a Russian city that his aides have likened to Oklahoma City because of the national trauma resulting from a 1995 Chechen attack on civilians there.

The president stood outside the hospital where Chechen guerrillas held more than 1,500 hostages for four days in June, and denounced the Muslim-led separatists and their movement, calling them “monsters of cruelty” and “a pillar of international terrorism.”

“Full-scale military operations are not underway” in Chechnya, Yeltsin insisted. “Only small gangs are being chased in some places.”

He did not mention Tuesday’s ambush lest it undermine his message about the nature of the fighting or his promise to end it.

But the 65-year-old president did confront, if belatedly, the lingering trauma of last summer’s raid, the first of two separatist attacks on Russian targets outside Chechnya. The raid on Budennovsk left 130 civilians dead, along with 36 government soldiers and police officers.

“I can understand the grief and humiliation of those who had to take up arms against terrorism while the state failed to prevent such a horrible thing,” a somber Yeltsin said after laying a memorial wreath for the dead. It was his first visit to Budennovsk, 90 miles from the Chechen border, since the attack.

Television footage of Yeltsin’s visit to the heavily damaged and now-restored Budennovsk hospital showed thousands of cheering spectators, including colorfully uniformed descendants of czarist-era Cossack warriors who presented the buoyant, 65-year-old president with a stallion, a felt coat, a sheepskin hat and a whip.

News agency reports from Budennovsk said the crowd also included many critics who showed up out of curiosity and said they will vote against Yeltsin.

“Our children are being sent to Chechnya to die,” one woman was quoted as saying. “How long will it last?”

Yeltsin had hoped to end the fighting by announcing on March 31 a halt in Russian military operations and a partial troop withdrawal and by offering mediated talks with Gen. Dzhokar M. Dudayev, the separatist leader.

But the Russian army has continued to bomb and shell Chechen villages occupied by separatists, and go-betweens have failed to engage Dudayev in peace talks, although he has not refused negotiations outright.

Two of the six Russian battalions scheduled to withdraw this week have crossed to nearby bases just across the Chechen border.

Yeltsin said Wednesday that Russian troops have withdrawn from two-thirds of Chechnya’s 350 towns and villages after local Chechen leaders signed agreements with the army to disarm their populations and keep the guerrillas at bay.

But Tuesday’s attack in Shatoi underlined the weakness of such commitments. Russian military sources quoted on television said Dudayev had instructed his fighters to withdraw from settlements, lie in wait and attack Russian convoys as they leave.