Russian Troops Storm Into The Chechen Capital Grozny Expected To Fall After New Year’s Eve Assault

Russian forces blasted their way into the center of Grozny on Saturday, invading Chechnya’s capital with tanks, setting its Parliament building ablaze and capturing key targets in a climactic New Year’s Eve assault on the rebel republic.

The besieged city is expected to fall to the vastly superior Russian forces that have been bombarding the oilrich, separatist Muslim republic of 1.2 million people since Dec. 11.

Still, Chechen President Dzhokar M. Dudayev remained defiant.

As Russian forces attacked his capital with tanks, warplanes, helicopter gunships and artillery shells, crushing apartment buildings and setting a gasoline storage plant on fire, the former Soviet air force general issued an address through Chechnya’s Foreign Ministry.

“Despite the entire might of the Russian army that is attacking Grozny, the Chechen people have already won a moral victory,” Dudayev declared.

The Chechen leader was believed to be hunkered down in the basement bunker of his presidential palace, across Freedom Square from the burning Parliament building. Russian human rights commissioner Sergei A. Kovalev, an opponent of his government’s resort to force, and a group of anti-war members of the Russian Parliament were reportedly in the bunker with Dudayev.

The Russian forces were clearly sparing no effort to bring a quick end to a war whose televised carnage has badly damaged Yeltsin’s popularity at home as well as his international image as a reformist leader.

Television footage from Grozny on Saturday showed flames pouring from some apartments; other buildings had black holes where once there had been living quarters.

In the afternoon, the Defense Ministry in Moscow issued a denial that the storming of Grozny was under way, and officials said that if anything there would be a New Year’s Eve lull in the fighting. Dudayev had asked for a cease-fire beginning at 8 p.m. Saturday, but Moscow ignored the messages.

By evening, the government press service confirmed that Russian troops had penetrated the city, seizing many administrative buildings in the central city as well as the railroad station.

The Russians also said they had taken control of the burning Lenin oil refinery complex and would begin extinguishing the blaze that had smothered the city in black smoke for a third day. Chechens said the Russians had bombed the refinery again Saturday.

The Federal Counterintelligence Service, the successor to the KGB, insisted Saturday that Russia had not bombed the refinery, which is vital to Chechnya’s economic prospects. The agency asserted that the Chechens had dug trenches, filled them with oil and set them on fire to give the appearance that the refinery had been bombed and thus put Russia in a bad light. There was no word on whether the blaze had spread to a nearby ammonia tank, but no explosions or gas leaks were reported.

Russian officials said 2,200 tons of food, medicine and other aid have been delivered to Mozdok, a town in North Ossetia , but little of it has reached the tens of thousands of people who have fled the fighting. On Friday, 3,108 more refugees registered with the authorities, bringing the official total to 42,932, but officials estimate the real number at more than 105,000.

Chechens see the Russian invasion as an attempt to crush their 3-yearold declaration of independence and recolonize their land. For his part, Yeltsin insists that no republic has the right to secede from Russia.