As Death Toll Rises, Russian Calls For Chechnya Truce, Peace Talks But Proposal Seems Doomed As Heavy Fighting Continues

Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin called Monday night for another cease-fire and immediate peace talks with Chechen rebels as estimates of Russian dead in the five-week war continued to rise, with one top lawmaker saying more than 2,000 Russian soldiers may have been killed.

But Chernomyrdin’s proposal seems doomed because it contains numerous elements that Chechen President Dzhokhar Dudayev and Chechen fighters have rejected before - most important, Moscow’s insistence that Chechnya remain part of the Russian Federation.

Russian troops were bogged down again in central Grozny, unable to take the presidential palace and sustaining heavy losses from fierce street fighting.

As the stalemate continued in the center of the capital, Russian troops shifted their campaign to villages along the city’s southern and western borders in an attempt to cut off Chechen supply routes.

In Moscow, the head of the Russian Parliament’s Defense Committee, Sergei Yushenkov, said in an interview that Russian losses are far higher than officially stated figures.

The Russian government said over the weekend that 394 soldiers had been killed and dozens more are missing.

“I think it is safe to say that the number of Russian army dead has already exceeded 2,000,” said Yushenkov, whose committee in the Duma oversees the Defense Ministry. “I think the Russian army may have 2,500 to 3,000 killed. … There is information that around Mozdok headquarters for the Grozny campaign there are 16 temporary morgues, located in tents, that are filled with corpses.”

He also said military hospitals “are filled to overflowing in Krasnodar, Rostov, Smolensk and other places. The number of injured is huge. I think there are about 6,000 to 7,000 wounded soldiers.”

Chernomyrdin’s call for peace talks and a second cease-fire - a 48-hour cease-fire collapsed almost immediately last week - comes at a time not only of increasing losses but also of slowly growing protests against the war. And if Yushenkov’s figures are correct, anti-war sentiment is almost certain to swell.

Public opinion polls already show three-quarters of the Russian populace opposing the war.

In his 15-minute speech, delivered on the main Russian television channel, Chernomyrdin vowed that the cost of the rapidly escalating war would not bankrupt the government and derail economic reforms.

“There will be no movement backward,” said the centrist prime minister who has tried to distance himself from the war.

“We will revise neither our financial policy nor privatization.”

But if his aim was to bring the war to a close, his proposals seemed highly unlikely to achieve that end.

He repeatedly referred to rebel Chechen fighters as “illegal armed bands” and made the same demands: installation of a Kremlin-backed provisional government in Chechnya, followed by elections.

He also insisted that Chechnya remain part of Russia, thus continuing to ignore the reality that both Dudayev and a great many Chechens want independence.