Russia Admits General Is Missing in Chechnya

As street fighting raged Thursday for control of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, rebel commanders in the separatist republic announced that they had captured a Russian general who had been supervising the army’s assault on the city.

The Russian Defense Ministry acknowledged that Gen. Mikhail Malofeyev had been missing since Tuesday, when he and a group of soldiers were caught in an ambush in Grozny. Russian officials said they didn’t know if the general had been captured or killed.

The general’s disappearance undercuts government attempts to project the image that its army is steadily gaining control over Chechnya with a minimum of casualties. The last time a Russian general went missing in action was during World War II, one military expert said.

The army’s 4-week-old campaign to seize Grozny has evolved into a guerrilla war in which the invading forces are becoming increasingly vulnerable. One Chechen leader said this week that the rebels are lying in wait for Russian troops now trying to seize the city center.

“The Chechen military strategy does not envisage the containment of the Russian army on the outskirts of the city,” rebel commander Mumadi Saidayev told the Interfax news service. “On the contrary, we wish armored vehicles to appear on the streets, since [rebel] mobile groups, which know how to destroy armor, are ready.”

Apparently, Malofeyev disappeared while he was touring forward positions in Grozny to inspect combat operations there. He holds the post of deputy commander of the northern group of Russian forces in Chechnya and is responsible for combat training.

The government, which has been accused of systematically underreporting its casualties, did not announce that the general was missing until the rebels claimed credit for capturing him.

The Chechen rebels’ Web site (https://www.kavkaz.org) reported Thursday that the general was captured and taken to a safe place where he was “being examined.” The Chechens also reported capturing a Russian colonel and 30 other “aggressors” during the preceding 24 hours.

Although the circumstances of the ambush were unclear, Russian media cited unnamed officials as saying that the general had been shot in the head and back by snipers. According to this version, the general was killed but the fighting was too intense for soldiers accompanying him to recover the body.

In a statement issued through the government-run news service, Itar-Tass, unnamed Russian officials said the Chechen claim of capturing Malofeyev was “a propaganda ploy.”

Others, however, were not convinced. Retired Col. Alexander Zhilin, a former military journalist assigned to the General Staff, questioned why the government waited two days before disclosing that Malofeyev was missing.

“The initial reaction along the entire chain of the military command was to conceal this fact the way they conceal the real casualty figures,” he said. “How can a general go missing in the course of an anti-terrorist operation? Generals at the front line don’t travel freely where they choose.”

Zhilin also questioned the Russian military strategy of trying to push the Chechen fighters out of villages and towns into the impregnable Caucasus Mountains if the goal is, in fact, to wipe them out, as acting President Vladimir V. Putin has said.

While Russian troops have succeeded in occupying much of Chechnya’s flatlands in the northern part of the republic, they have not been able to force the rebels out of Grozny since they began moving into the city Christmas Day. Fierce fighting and massive aerial bombing have virtually destroyed the city, where thousands of civilians are still hiding in basements.

“Russia is now entering a new period of shocking military tragedies, and the disappearance of a general is just one of the many signs that the campaign is getting out of hand for the federal troops,” said Zhilin, now an analyst for the weekly Moskovskiye Novosti. “The generals, it seems, don’t know how to win this war, and besides, there is one less of them now.”

In another sign that Russian forces are in disarray, human rights activists charged Thursday that federal troops occupying parts of the republic are raping Chechen women.

Human Rights Watch, a New York-based group that is monitoring the conflict, said it has documented a number of rape cases based on the accounts of refugees who have fled to the neighboring Russian republic of Ingushetia. Many of the victims have been raped at gunpoint. In one incident, Russian troops raped a pregnant woman and then killed her, the group charged.

“Rape is a war crime, and these allegations about rape in Chechnya are very serious,” said Regan Ralph, a Human Rights Watch official. In recent years, troops in Rwanda and the former Yugoslav federation have been convicted of rape in war crimes trials, the organization noted.

The rights group earlier gathered evidence that Russian forces went on a rampage after occupying the village of Alkhan-Yurt, killing at least 19 civilians while looting their homes. Many of the reported rapes took place there, the group said.