Russia said yesterday that US criticism of its military operation in Chechnya amounted to helping an "information terrorism" campaign waged by rebels.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said that remarks by a US State Department spokesman, Mr James Rubin, about the Chechen campaign on Thursday were "absolutely unacceptable, both in form and content."
Mr Rubin had called on Russia to investigate reports of human rights abuses in Chechnya, and accused Russia of denying reporters access to the war zone.
"Rubin, operating on clearly tendentiously selected reports, and even blatant disinformation supplied by the terrorists themselves among others, speculates on `credible reports of the killings of civilians and other violations'," Russia's Foreign Ministry said. "This is tantamount to co-operating in a campaign of information terrorism."
The statement said the US had no right to criticise Russia's conduct in Chechnya after last year's NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia and amid continuing air strikes on Iraq.
Earlier, Russian officials promised to investigate new reports of human rights violations in Chechnya, where Moscow announced plans to finally crush rebel resistance within a month.
The New York-based watchdog Human Rights Watch issued a report accusing Russian forces of torturing, beating and occasionally raping prisoners at a detention camp. Moscow has denied such accusations, but international pressure is mounting.
Col Gen. Valery Manilov, the first deputy chief of the armed forces' general staff, said there was no firm deadline for the operation to end, but if everything went according to plan it would be over within a month.
Such a time-frame could boost the fortunes of the acting President, Mr Vladimir Putin, whose tough Chechnya stance has helped make him runaway favourite in the presidential election on March 26th.
Human rights organisations have said troops looted houses, conducted summary executions and mistreated civilians suspected of abetting the rebels.
Mr Malcolm Hawkes, a researcher for Human Rights Watch in Moscow, said: "In January it transpires that in the Staropromyslovsky district [of Grozny] there were over 41 summary executions of civilians by Russian soldiers. The victims of these executions were primarily elderly men and women."
Mr Hawkes said the situation in special detention centres, where Chechens suspected of abetting rebels are taken, raised most concern.
"Detainees in these camps are being beaten, tortured, on occasion raped and even killed. The situation is absolutely horrific."
Russian troops have seized all of Chechnya's lowlands, but fighting continues in the mountains to the south where rebels remain dug in, and guerrillas who fled the capital, Grozny, have clashed with troops.