President of Chechnya prepared to hold talks

As fighting continued in parts of Grozny the Chechen President, Mr Aslan Maskhadov, has announced that he is prepared to hold talks with the Russian Emergencies Minister, Mr Sergei Shoigu, and the OSCE president, Mr Knut Vollebaek.

Mr Maskhadov's representative in the Ingush capital, Nazran, told the AFP news agency that the Chechen President was also prepared to guarantee the safety of the two men.

Mr Shoigu is on record as saying that he would "talk with the devil" in order to ensure that civilians remaining in Grozny could get to safety. Mr Vollebaek has consistently called for talks to end the war, Mr Shoigu said yesterday.

The Russian Prime Minister, Mr Vladimir Putin, however, was not in such a peaceful mood. Echoing President Yeltsin's remarks in Beijing, he said Russia would use all diplomatic and military levers against Western pressure on Chechnya.

"You understand what I mean by diplomatic levers. As for the military, one of them is the Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missile," he told the official ITAR-TASS news agency. Mr Putin was speaking at the test launch of the Topol-M near the northern city of Arkhangelsk.

While unlikely to cause a tremor in Western military circles, Mr Putin's remarks may further boost his popularity and those of his associates in the run-up to Sunday's general election.

The fighting in Grozny yesterday appeared to be confined to specific areas of the city rather than constituting an all-out assault as had been claimed by the pro-Chechen news agency, Kavkaz-Tsentr.

Russian officers also denied that a full attack was under way, but their spokesman in the Dagestani capital, Makhachkala, Col Gennady Alyokhin, said that Shali, the last key town on the approaches to the Chechen capital, was now in Russian hands.

Russian sources claim that those civilians remaining in Grozny have been prevented leaving because the Chechens are using them as human shields. The independent organisation, Human Rights Watch, claimed in a report yesterday, however, that many refugees could not reach safety because Russian troops had implemented a system of abuse and extortion at a number of checkpoints.

One refugee claimed to the organisation that he had to pay 1,000 roubles (£30) to pass through a checkpoint at Pervomayskaya to the north of Grozny on Sunday. In another incident reported to HRW soldiers at the Kavkaz-1 checkpoint near the border with Ingushetia, soldiers were alleged to have beaten refugees returning to Chechnya to extort money.

Many of those leaving Grozny in the past few days have claimed that the majority of those remaining in the city now are ethnic Russians who are too poor to get out of the city.

In the 1994-1996 Chechen war, when at one stage up to 4,000 pieces of ordnance per hour were being dropped on the city, it was the ethnic-Russian population which had to bear the brunt of the shelling after Chechens escaped to relatives in the hinterland.

Meanwhile, in a bizarre echo of NATO's rescue of one of its pilots shot down over Kosovo, Russian television last night showed pictures of the rescue of the pilot of a Sukhoi-25 jet fighter in Chechnya.

Seamus Martin can be contacted by e-mail at: seamus.martin@russia.com

Russian troops clashed with rebel forces in Grozny for the first time last evening. Chechen rebels said they had shot down two Russian planes and five Russian helicopters and inflicted heavy losses on federal forces on the eastern side of Grozny.