Russia's brutally clever game

Photojournalist James Hill reports from the Chechen front line on the second war with Yeltsin's Kremlin

THE second Chechen war, as the Russian press calls it, had been very different from the first up until last week. The Russians had avoided confrontations except in the open, where they could bring their overwhelming firepower to bear. They advanced to the outskirts of Grozny with few though not insignificant losses and the Chechen capital sat seemingly at their mercy.

A few days ago, I stood at a captured Chechen trench line in Primykaniye, barely three miles east of Grozny, and watched Su-24 planes blast their rockets away. Every morning, I woke up in Mozdok, the Russian military base, over the Chechen border in neighbouring North Ossetia, to hear the bombers taking off.

The Russians hugely miscalculated Chechen strength in the first war. But, in the last two months, they have sent in more than 100,000 troops.

Anything or anywhere that has shown resistance has been flattened. The Russian military has denied this, but it was mistakenly shown up when Sergei Shoigu, the emergencies minister, opened a new corridor to the west of Grozny at the end of last week and guided journalists straight past the still-smouldering ruins of Alkhan-Yurt.

The fierce bombardment that the Russians had launched on Grozny since it came in range has given the Chechens the battleground on which they thrive.

Misha Kashpurin, a refugee from the city and one of the few Russian civilians left in Grozny, described the city as nothing but a ruin. Nearly all the refugees described the bombardment as being even worse than in the last war. The Russian generals know that their strength lies in their huge advantage in materiel but they also realise that they are hampered by the inexperience of the conscripts and the indiscipline of the contract soldiers.

When touring one of the northern districts of Chechnya's "liberated" areas with the local commander, a police colonel stopped our minibus and deposited two drunk soldiers in the back. It was still 20 minutes to noon and the two were so inebriated they could not sit on the floor without collapsing.

SO far, this war has been as politically popular as the last one was unpopular. This is largely because television stations such as ORT, the main channel, only show Russian victories. The dirty soldier is never interviewed. Off camera, he wanders over to the foreign journalists to scrounge a decent cigarette and tell his tales of bitter fighting and heavy losses.

Ironically, the Russians sometimes try to rebuild with one hand what they destroy with the other. The Russian arrival has not been fiercely fought everywhere, even if Nikolai Koshman, the civilian governor of the "liberated areas" still has to travel with two light tanks and 10 special-forces bodyguards.

But he also brings gas and electricity, which some Chechens have not known for five years. In Znamenskoye, in the north of Chechnya, I found nobody who would utter a word of welcome for the Russians but very few had something good to say for the "government" of Aslan Maskhadov, the Chechen president. Everyone was simply tired of living badly. The local schoolteacher lamented giving up teaching Arabic as a foreign language, but he was equally glad to have heating and light and new textbooks, even if they were only in Russian.

The war will be taken to the mountains, where it will be very hard for Russian armour to penetrate the twisty ravines. The guerrilla conflict Russia wants to avoid is inevitable. The Russians may take all of Chechnya and make it once more part of Russia but few Chechens will think they have been liberated.

Copyright 1999
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