FIERCE battles continued yesterday between Chechen rebels and Russian forces in the Chechen capital, Crozny, with grenade launchers, automatic weapons and mortars.
The rebels claimed the Russians have lost 80 armoured vehicles, nine helicopters and an aircraft. The Russians denied losing an aircraft, but admitted heavy losses, including at least 70 dead and several hundred injured.
The Moscow backed deputy Interior Minister, Mr Yuri Plugin, said up to 2,000 rebels were "dominating the situation" in central Grozny.
It is unlikely that the rebel band, consisting of only a few hundred men, can hold the city against far superior numbers of federal troops. But the mere fact they infiltrated the city and caused so much death and destruction was a severe blow to President Yeltsin on the eve of his inauguration today.
Even yesterday, after Russian reinforcements arrived in the city and helicopter gunships bounded rebel positions, the guerrillas were putting up fierce resistance and the fighting was far from over.
The rebels declared openly this was their gift to the president who had promised to bring peace to the Caucasus if Russians reelected him but who instead had allowed air raids on Chechen villages within days of being returned to the Kremlin.
"We went in Yeltsin's direction during the elections, believing that he would really stop the war in Chechnya, and not only halted military actions but even allowed presidential elections to be carried out on our territory, a Chechen field commander with the nom-de-guerre of "Rezvan" was quoted in Izvestia as saying.
"But it turns out that Yeltsin tricked everyone. As soon as he won the elections, he immediately forgot about our war and does not notice the daily bombings. Now we want to ruin his celebrations and remind all his guests that the war is continuing and that Chechen will never be conquered by force."
With the peace process in tatters, force was all Moscow had to offer yesterday. While the helicopter gunships known as "crocodiles" fired rockets against rebel positions in the suburb, army reinforcements, whose convoys had rumbled into Grozny overnight, fought to clear guerrillas from around the compound of the pro-Moscow government in the city centre.
Yesterday evening the Tass correspondent, one of several Russian journalists trapped inside the building, said shooting was still going on. A spokesman for the Russian command said the situation had "improved considerably" since Wednesday when federal forces virtually lost control on the ground and could do little but attack the Chechens from the air.
Nevertheless the leader of the raid, Mr Shamil Basayev, notorious for having taken hundreds of civilians hostage in a hospital in southern Russia last year, declared scornfully that, if a Russian delegation wished to make peace with him, they would be as safe as the city was in his hands.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said it was "extremely concerned" about hundreds of wounded civilians left, unattended during three days of fighting.
Many civilians slipped out of Grozny before the rebels entered the city on Tuesday, apparently after being warned that a raid was imminent. But hundreds of others remained and have been cowering in cellars throughout the onslaught. All of this means that today will be more of a day of mourning than of celebration for the newly re-elected Russian president.