Truce Likely in Chechnya, Yeltsin, Rebel Leader Say

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin and the separatist military leader in Chechnya say they expect to reach a cease-fire accord on Monday when the two sides hold their highest-level talks in 17 months of war.

A halt in fighting in the breakaway republic would boost Yeltsin’s chances in Russia’s June 16 presidential election. Pollsters say the war, which has claimed as many as 30,000 lives, is his biggest obstacle to reelection.

“I think we will reach an agreement on a full cessation of all armed conflict,” Yeltsin said Saturday during a campaign stop in the Arctic city of Vorkuta. “Of course, we will not surrender Chechnya.”

His prediction echoed one by Col. Aslan Maskhadov, the rebel military commander, who said Monday’s meeting between Yeltsin and Chechen leader Zelimkhan A. Yanderbiyev will focus narrowly on a cease-fire and other military matters--not the issue of Chechnya’s independence.

“We have to stop the war,” Maskhadov told reporters Friday in Chechnya. “This is the main problem, and it is important both for Yeltsin and for us.”

The talks, arranged over the opposition of the Russian defense minister, are a breakthrough in themselves. Yeltsin’s refusal to sit in the same room with Chechen independence leader Dzhokar M. Dudayev had been a major obstacle to a settlement.

But Dudayev’s death in a Russian rocket attack April 21 appears to have broken a deadlock. After two weeks of shuttle diplomacy by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Yeltsin and Yanderbiyev, Dudayev’s civilian successor, agreed to meet in Moscow.

Yeltsin sent his army to Chechnya in December 1994 but failed to crush its drive for independence.

Peace talks mediated by the OSCE produced a cease-fire and a July 30 agreement on rebel disarmament, prisoner swaps and Russian troop withdrawals.

The accord foundered last autumn on mutual distrust and renewed fighting, and it was never fully implemented--nor was an agreement to hold further talks on the political status of the tiny, mostly Muslim republic of nearly 1 million people.

Tim Guldimann, a Swiss diplomat who heads the OSCE mission in Chechnya, said in a telephone interview Saturday that both sides agreed last week on the need to revive the July 30 pact in some form.

“They’re going to talk about first steps,” he said.

Maskhadov said the separatists set one condition--that Yeltsin swear he had no part in ordering Dudayev’s death and rule out assassination attempts on other rebel leaders.

In turn, he said, his army would “freeze” any plans for terrorist attacks inside Russia.

Dudayev’s death at first seemed to doom the peace plan Yeltsin had announced three weeks earlier, when he offered the Chechen leader indirect talks and wide political autonomy for his republic within the Russian Federation.

Many diplomats and Russian officials predicted that Dudayev’s followers would behave more radically and possibly splinter, making peace talks impossible.

So far, that has not happened. Rebel field commanders, a diverse lot, met last week and endorsed the new peace talks unanimously, dropping an earlier condition that Dudayev’s killers be brought to justice.

It now appears that Dudayev’s death made it easier for the separatists to go along--tentatively, at least--with a Kremlin strategy that appears to be aimed more at getting Yeltsin elected than resolving the conflict.

Dudayev was never eager for peace talks that would help Yeltsin beat back Communist leader Gennady A. Zyuganov’s strong challenge at the polls.

He told The Times in mid-March that Communists “would be a gift from heaven compared to [Yeltsin’s] criminal regime.”

But Maskhadov told reporters Friday that Chechens could never trust the party that ruled the Soviet Union, deported their republic’s entire population to Central Asia during World War II and kept them in exile for 13 years.

“At this meeting [Monday] it will be clear to Yanderbiyev if [the Russians] really want to stop the war or not,” the Chechen commander added.

He warned, however: “If we have any doubt . . . then we will help the Communists.”

Both sides are exhausted from a war neither side can win militarily. The separatists have 3,800 well-trained fighters, enough to resist Moscow for quite a while. But Maskhadov and some field commanders never fully shared Dudayev’s mission “to fight to the last Chechen.”

“There is an understanding now that there is a real chance for peace,” said Guldimann of the OSCE. “I have the impression they are serious.”

The approach of talks set off a fierce battle last week for the village of Bamut in southwestern Chechnya, where separatist fighters have held ground throughout the war in a Soviet-built nuclear missile silo.

A Russian commander declared Friday that his men had overrun Bamut, but a Chechen spokesman said rebels were clinging to part of the village.

It is not clear whether the Russian offensive is a bid to thwart the peace talks or simply to gain a victory that will make concessions at the talks easier to justify. Previous calls by Yeltsin for a unilateral cease-fire have been ignored by his army.

Gen. Pavel S. Grachev, Yeltsin’s defense minister, voiced opposition to the peace talks Saturday, saying the war will end only when separatists have been “totally annihilated.”

He said Yanderbiyev has no power over such militant field commanders as Shamil Basayev, whom he called an “outright terrorist.”

Basayev led a deadly raid on a Russian hospital last year and has since threatened terrorist acts such as the detonation of radioactive materials in Moscow.

But Grachev did not suggest that he would resist a cease-fire order.