Chechen Rebels Storm Capital, 2 More Towns

Separatists in Chechnya stormed the region’s Russian-controlled capital and two nearby towns at dawn Tuesday, dealing Boris N. Yeltsin a stinging blow as he prepared for his inauguration this week after winning a second term as Russia’s president.

Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers scuttled out of the scorched ruins of Grozny as Chechen fighters swept back into the town they lost last year, seizing administrative buildings in most of the capital’s districts.

Russian gunships circled above Grozny’s rail station, marketplace and central food warehouse, firing missiles into a city that is still home to hundreds of thousands of civilian survivors of 20 months of war. The Interfax news agency reported that five aircraft were shot down.

By nightfall, the separatists were closing in on the heavily fortified government compound in central Grozny, where a pro-Moscow puppet government works behind razor wire and high walls of sandbags. Russian television said rebels were shelling the road to the Russian military airport.

Rebels also entered the towns of Argun and Gudermes. The independent television station NTV said they took both with scarcely a shot fired.

The Chechen war began in December 1994, when Russian troops attacked Chechnya, hoping to destroy a 3-year-old separatist regime there. Grozny fell two months later, but the combat has raged on.

Separatists fight on from the hills; they briefly retook Grozny in an attack five months ago. Muslim Chechens remain defiant of the Russian masters who have ruled them, mostly by force, for two centuries. Moscow’s suspicions of what it views as a criminally minded ethnic minority are undimmed.

On Tuesday, accurate casualty figures were all but impossible to establish. The latest in a welter of conflicting and partial Russian reports said 23 Russian soldiers were killed and 91 injured. There were no figures from the Chechen side, which rarely lists its own victims. But NTV said more than 70 wounded civilians in Grozny were crowded into one hospital alone.

If they were able, civilians ran away from Grozny. About one-third of the Chechens--300,000 people--have fled their homes since the start of the war, in which an estimated 30,000 people have been killed.

Russian television Tuesday showed pictures of barefoot parents and children, clutching bags of food, sandals and bottles of water, stumbling from the deafening noise of war in the city.

“Bombs, rockets, helicopters, death,” said one ragged father. “I have to save the kids.”

Tuesday’s concerted attack marked the final collapse of a cease-fire negotiated by Yeltsin’s government before last month’s runoff presidential election, when Kremlin officials worried that the unpopular war would damage their leader’s reelection chances.

But Russian forces have violated the truce by bombing Chechen towns ever since Yeltsin’s victory was announced in early July. Tuesday’s onslaught was the Chechens’ retaliation, separatist spokesman Movladi Udugov said, telling NTV: “This is a natural response to the large-scale military actions which Russia resumed unilaterally right after the election.”

He poured scorn on a threat by Sergei V. Stepashin, the head of a Moscow commission looking into a peace settlement in the war-ravaged region, to call off future talks with the separatists unless their leader, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, disavows Tuesday’s attack.

“I would respond that we cannot reconcile ourselves to such an emotional way of stating the problem,” Udugov said. “I think it is dangerous and shortsighted for either side to try to force the other to its knees. We wish for a negotiated settlement and for the Kremlin to fulfill its pledges.”

Ironically reversing the cops-and-robbers terminology that Moscow often uses to explain its operations in Chechnya, Udugov described Tuesday’s advance by Chechen separatists as a police-style “special operation” to neutralize Russian “illegal armed bands” roaming his homeland.

But international mediator Tim Guldimann of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said Tuesday’s attack can only worsen the conflict.

Yeltsin’s inauguration is set for Friday.

But a series of meetings the president held Tuesday with Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin and security czar Alexander I. Lebed to fine-tune arrangements was overshadowed by the latest Chechen crisis, Russian news agencies said.

Meantime, an explosive device narrowly missed Chernomyrdin’s car on the outskirts of Moscow on Tuesday morning. The Russians continued to investigate the incident, which they did not immediately blame on Chechens.