AS DARKNESS fell, the Dagestani landscape around Pervomaiskoye near the border with Chechnya was silent after a day of intermittent bombing which had finally reduced the village to ruins.
Earlier yesterday President Yeltsin said the siege was over and claimed 153 Chechen fighters had been killed, and 28 captured. Members of a Chechen separatist group called Lone Wolf had brought some 100 hostages to the Russian village from a hospital in Kizlyar.
According to Mr Yeltsin, the Russian forces lost 26 soldiers, while 82 hostages were freed and 18 were unaccounted for, possibly having escaped.
However, these figures remain highly dubious.
If Mr Yeltsin is right, his claim gives the lie to statements by his Federal Security Service which on Wednesday said the Chechens had massacred "practically all" of their hostages, apart from 28 who were either freed or escaped.
Mr Yeltsin's claims were also at odds with a figure of 42 hostages given by his Prime Minister, Mr Viktor Chernomyrdin.
The confusion owed much to the Kremlin's decision to expel journalists from the vicinity of Pervomaiskoye for the last phase of the assault.
The hostages themselves were far from convinced that the Russian soldiers had their best interests at heart. Mr Dima Alexanderovieh said he had escaped after breaking through Russian lines with a band of Chechens.
He denied Russian claims that the Chechens executed any of the hostages. They never shot anyone, he said. They didn't abuse us.
However, the Russians had almost killed him on numerous occasions, he claimed. "The last two days they were simply carpet bombing us. There's not a house left undamaged."
Mr Yeltsin said that the reason the assault on the small village was so protracted was that it concealed an underground base with concrete gun emplacements, a bizarre claim.
Russian TV crews, taken to within 500 metres of the village by the military authorities, saw 30 bodies, apparently Chechen fighters. They said that some of the guerrillas had been mowed down after penetrating Russian lines.
A Russian soldier also produced a video tape of what appeared to be some 20 Chechens taken prisoner by the Russians.
In the early hours yesterday the Russians suffered another humiliation when Chechen rebels managed to attack the forces from the rear by mounting a raid in nearby Sovetskoye reportedly killing three policemen.
Philippa Fletcher reports from Moscow
The bodies of dozens Chechen rebels, some with heads and limbs blown off, lay in a blood soaked ditch outside Pervomaiskoye yesterday.
In television footage to harrowing to be aired, Russian camera crews filmed headless and limbless corpses, some still burning from the pounding by Grad rockets. Beside them lay a satellite telephone they had used to contact their colleagues during a week long Russian siege.
Separate footage from a muddy field in fading afternoon lights showed injured rebels facing questioning by reporters. Most were too badly injured to make much sense. "I can't talk now ... blood is coming out of here," one man said, looking down at his mangled hand.
Officials acknowledged that some of the rebels got away, but said they did not know whether the rebel leader, Mr Salman Raduyev, was among them.
Some of the hostages we think they were not real hostages but collaborators left with them. Around 15 people," the Russian army chief, Gen Mikhail Barsukov, said. "The main thing is that we managed to get by with little bloodshed. Most of the hostages were freed about 90 people."
He added "We did not find a single hostage killed during the operation which we conducted here." He suggested some of them may have been buried.