Russia Bombs Airport in Chechnya’s Capital : Caucasus: Attacks on Grozny and on villages believed to be rebel areas are the most intrusive since Moscow lost control of the separatist republic in ’96.

Russian warplanes bombed the airport in the capital of Chechnya on Thursday, destroying an aircraft and bringing the fight against Islamic rebels to the heart of the separatist republic.

Russian and Chechen officials said warplanes also struck half a dozen Chechen villages in areas where the rebels are believed to have bases.

“The bombings will continue in the future,” said Col. Alexander B. Drobyshevsky, a spokesman for the Russian air force. “We will bomb them until we destroy all the terrorists.”

Drobyshevsky said the airport attack destroyed an An-2 turboprop, reported to have been Chechnya’s only operational aircraft. He charged that the plane was used to carry weapons and other supplies to rebel bases.

A technician working on the plane was killed, Russian news reports said.

“The plane was destroyed on the ground. It was a precise and clean job,” Drobyshevsky said.

Late in the day, the Interfax news agency reported that Russian planes were continuing to bomb an oil refinery and other targets in and around Grozny, the Chechen capital.

The attacks were the most intrusive into Chechen territory since Russia lost control over the republic in a 1994-96 war against separatist guerrillas.

Fighting in the region resumed in August when a group of rebels crossed into the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan, saying their goal was to form an independent Islamic state in the Caucasus mountains. Chechnya’s elected officials say they are unable to rein in the rebels, led by two famous warlords: Shamil Basayev and a Saudi- or Jordanian-born fighter known as Khattab.

Anger in Russia has been heightened in recent weeks by five terrorist bombings, widely blamed on followers of Basayev and Khattab, that have killed more than 300 people in Moscow and other cities. Russian police announced that they had foiled a bombing Thursday when they located three suspicious sacks in the basement of a building in the western city of Ryazan, though later reports said the sacks contained only sugar.

Driven by fear of new terrorist bombings, many Russians are taking part in official and vigilante neighborhood patrols to keep an eye on darker-skinned people from the Caucasus region, which includes Chechnya. Russian troops have spent the past few days trying to seal off the republic from the rest of the country by building a cordon sanitaire around Chechnya. It is a difficult job, since about half of Chechnya’s border goes through inaccessible mountains or abuts the independent nation of Georgia.

Chechen and Russian officials said they have no plans to escalate the conflict to a full-fledged ground war. But Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov responded to the airport attack by mustering his military officers and preparing for a full mobilization of the republic’s forces.

“The chief commander has been instructed to immediately assemble all former commanders and give each of them assignments in case of an invasion by Russian forces into Chechnya,” Maskhadov’s spokesman, Selim Abdulmuslimov, told Russian news services in Grozny.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin also repeated assurances that “we have no plans” for a full-scale ground attack. But he insisted that Russian troops will continue to fight the rebels.

Igor M. Klyamkin, director of the Institute of Political Analysis in Moscow, said Russia’s generals are trying to apply lessons from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s conflict this spring with Yugoslavia to their own conflict with Chechnya.

“They are borrowing tactics from the Americans by trying to wage war without direct contact, using planes, rockets and bombs,” Klyamkin said. “It’s not immediately clear how effective these bombings may be, but it’s unlikely they could hit only terrorists and leave civilians alive and buildings intact.”