Russia Justifies War in Chechnya to U.N. Chief

Russia’s prime minister told U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Saturday that Russia has right on its side in the war against Chechnya, demonstrating his government’s determination to pay no more heed to Western criticism than NATO did to Kremlin opposition to its bombing of Yugoslavia this year.

The Chechen war has strong media backing in Russia, and popular support for it remains high. With anti-Western sentiment on the rise, some analysts say the growing U.S. and European pressure for a political settlement is only strengthening Russia’s military resolve.

Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin’s 20-minute phone conversation with Annan came as Russian planes relentlessly attacked Chechen towns overnight and throughout the day, flying a record number of bombing missions for the 6-week-old war.

Russian military officials announced Saturday that warplanes had carried out 120 sorties against the separatist republic in the previous 24 hours, and helicopter gunships 60 more, causing massive damage in the capital, Grozny, and other population centers. Chechen leaders said many civilians had been killed in the attacks.

With the West pushing hard for a political settlement, Putin told Annan that Russia will not negotiate with “those who posed next to the corpses of our citizens.”

Putin characterizes the war as part of an international struggle against terrorism and, at the same time, insists that it is purely an internal matter.

“From the moral point of view, our position is absolutely transparent and substantiated,” the prime minister said at a meeting of the powerful Security Council in the Kremlin later Saturday. “We shall never sit down at the negotiating table with bandits.”

Annan had issued a strong statement Friday arguing that Russia’s bombing is killing innocent people and far exceeds what is necessary to destroy terrorists. But after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s air campaign against Yugoslavia last spring, Western moral suasion lacks much force in Russia.

Analyst Victor A. Kremenyuk, deputy director of the USA-Canada Institute in Moscow, said the differences over Chechnya could presage a sharp deterioration in Russia’s relationship with the West.

“The pressure that the West and primarily the U.S. is trying to put on Russia is totally counterproductive, shortsighted and, to put it bluntly, stupid,” he said. “It pushes the Russian military to display more resolution in their drive to destroy the terrorists in Chechnya--whatever the cost--and it makes them even more willing to bomb the whole of Chechnya to smithereens in order to achieve the victory the public now expects of them.”

Kremenyuk said President Boris N. Yeltsin and Putin now cannot afford to back down on Chechnya.

“The growing Western pressure makes their position on Chechnya even more irreversible,” he said, predicting that the wave of nationalist sentiment engendered by the war will have a significant effect on the presidential election scheduled for next summer, in which Putin has said he will be a candidate.

“If Putin comes to power on the wave of the strongest pro-military and anti-Western mood in decades, he will not be able to return to normal dialogue with the West for some time,” Kremenyuk said.

He added that the Western pressure has also toughened the Russian media’s pro-war stance.

“Major TV channels and newspapers just can’t risk having their popularity destroyed. For them to take up or even slightly follow the Western stance in their Chechen coverage would be suicidal, especially in the light of the coming elections,” he said. In addition to next year’s presidential vote, parliamentary elections are set for Dec. 19.

While making scant mention of civilian Chechen casualties in the bombings, the Russian media have paid substantial attention to the facilities the government has provided in the Russian-controlled northern sector of Chechnya, reporting that schools, clinics and power sources are operating.

Even the NTV network, which usually broadcasts a line critical of the Kremlin, has been supportive of the war. The network has evinced little sympathy for the Chechens since paying an undisclosed ransom in 1997 to free a journalist and two crew members held hostage for three months by Chechen kidnappers.

Oleg B. Dobrodeyev, NTV’s director general, who met with the kidnappers in Chechnya five times, says the station’s view of Chechnya has altered dramatically since the 1994-96 war there. During that conflict, NTV fearlessly exposed Russian military bungles leading to the slaughter of Russian soldiers.

“The idealized view of Chechnya that existed back then is no longer there,” Dobrodeyev said. He denied the coverage is slanted, however, contending that Chechnya is different and arguing that the Chechens are to blame for the fact that his crews cannot work in the Chechen-held southern sector.

“It is not us, not NTV, that has changed. The Chechen leaders have done all this themselves. I personally had been involved in this situation on a daily basis for too long. I know the problem and the people way too well,” he said.

The war has also produced a flurry of Cold War-style rhetoric from top Russian military commanders, the latest from Lt. Gen. Vyacheslav Tikhomirov, who wrote Saturday in the military newspaper Red Star that the West wants to push Moscow into conflict with the Muslim world.

“The forces that want to consolidate their victory in the Cold War are now trying to destroy Russia’s position on the Eurasian continent,” Tikhomirov wrote.

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Sergei L. Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.