Russian Planes Strike Chechen Industrial Sites

Russian warplanes intensified airstrikes against Chechnya on Friday, bombing the separatist republic’s few working oil wells, its refinery and television tower and turning thousands of fearful civilians into refugees.

Cars packed with mostly women and children poured out of Grozny, the Chechen capital, and other targeted areas and headed toward the border with the Russian republic of Ingushetia. It was not clear whether Russian troops, who have put up a cordon around Chechnya, will permit them to cross the border.

TV showed billows of black smoke rising above the oil refinery, one of the few major enterprises in the republic.

Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov told reporters that 23 people died in the raids and he pleaded with the Russian leadership to stop the bombardment and settle differences through diplomacy, not military action.

“A pending catastrophe in the north Caucasus can be averted and thousands of Russian and Chechens can be saved if Russia’s leadership consents to resolve problems at the negotiation table,” Maskhadov said, according to the Interfax news agency.

He warned that Chechnya is prepared to resume its war against Russia if necessary. Though still a Russian republic, Chechnya has been virtually independent since defeating Russian troops in the 1994-96 conflict.

But Russian officials, incensed over recent terrorist bombings in Moscow and several other cities, are in no mood to compromise with the Chechens, whom they blame for those attacks.

“I would not call it a second war,” Russian air force spokesman Col. Alexander B. Drobyshevsky said of the airstrikes. “Wiping out bandits is a police operation, not a military one. But the one thing we are sure of is that the strikes will continue until the bandits are completely destroyed. This time, they will get the full treatment. Our final objective is to destroy them, and we will destroy the very last one of them.”

The hostilities resumed in August when rebels led two incursions into the Russian republic of Dagestan, Chechnya’s neighbor to the east, and said they wanted to establish an Islamic state. Russian forces eventually pushed them back to bases inside Chechnya.

Those clashes were followed beginning Aug. 31 by five terrorist bombings at apartment buildings and a shopping mall, which killed more than 300 people. Although investigations continue, Russian officials have publicly blamed Chechen rebels for the blasts.

Russian warplanes started bombing targets inside Chechnya in earnest Thursday, ostensibly to destroy the rebels’ supply routes and bases.

“We have not been aiming at any civilian facilities,” Drobyshevsky said. “But who knows what’s really happening there. . . . The Chechen authorities can say whatever they like, but no one can say whether these reports about civilian casualties or peaceful civilians fleeing are true or not.”