Russia claims key posts in Grozny, to attack main base

News reports said Russian forces had occupied heights overlooking the city centre and were battling for control of a canned goods factory on the northern edge, scene of heavy fighting when Russia last stormed Grozny in 1994-95.

Little information has been available about the scale of fighting. Both sides say they are inflicting heavy losses on the enemy while suffering virtually no casualties themselves.

Russian generals, anxious to avoid a comparison to the hasty and botched storming of Grozny five years ago, have played down the scale and pace of fighting in the capital.

General Alexander Baranov, acting Russian commander inChechnya, said only four Russian troops and one pro-Moscow Chechen militia fighter had been killed on Monday and Tuesday, while Russian forces had killed about 200 Chechens.

A reporter for the Washington Post outside Grozny described several wrecked Russian armoured vehicles being towed out of the city and quoted a Russian officer at a nearby headquarters as saying: “We’re taking lots of casualties.”

A Chechen rebel website reported hundreds of Russian dead in various parts of the city, but its figures have been greatly exaggerated in the past.

Russia says its forces are moving slowly into Grozny to reduce casualties among troops and civilians, between 10,000 and 40,000 of whom remain trapped in dark cellars under constant bombardment, with little food or firewood.

Three months into its Chechen campaign Russia now controls the rebel region’s northern steppes and the fertile valley south of Grozny that forms the province’s heartland.

But the last rebel strongholds–the heavily fortifiedcapital and the Caucasus mountains further south–are far easier for outnumbered but mobile guerillas to defend than the lowland towns and villages Russia has seized so far.

Russia’s force, at about 1,00,000 men, is three times the size it was when it was defeated in the last Chechnya war and commanders are using their numbers to strike in the mountains and in Grozny simultaneously, splitting Chechen resistance.