PRESIDENT Yeltsin could not conceal his anger on Russian TV in his reaction to the latest Chechen outrage. "How can I understand you generals? Are you playing games? Instead of putting posts everywhere, strengthening forces and blocking the route of the fighters, what have you done?" he roared as he banged his fist on a table.

It may not be advisable for a president with heart trouble to work himself up into a rage on national TV but it is certainly understandable. The latest Chechen offensive is the newest in a long series of events which have damaged Mr Yeltsin's image almost to the point of destruction as the vital presidential election looms in just five months time.

He suffered a major setback last month when his nominee, the Prime Minister, Mr Viktor Chernomyrdin, managed to finish only third behind the Communists and ultra nationalists in a parliamentary election widely regarded as a "primary" for the presidential poll.

Loss of superpower status, a feeling that the country had become, as some Russians say half jokingly and half in earnest, a "Burkina Faso with rockets", may have played as much a part in the Communist victory as the electorate's worries about food prices and burgeoning criminality.

In a move to appease the nationalist forces, and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation must be counted in this camp, Mr Yeltsin forced the resignation of his pro western Foreign Minister, Mr Andrei Kozyrev, and replaced him with Mr Yevgeny Primakov, a director of one of the successor organisations to the KGB.

The stage was set to show the West or, more importantly, the voters at home, that the vast Russian Federation was a major power which would not blindly follow the West's lead.

Then, along came a rag tag band of Chechen fighters to outwit the might of what was once the impregnable Red Army and score, for all the action's savagery, a major propaganda victory over Mr Yeltsin's administration.

On May 9th of last year, the 50th anniversary of VE Day, the Russian Defence Minister, Gen Pavel Grachev, reviewed the old soldiers, sailors and airmen who had played such a major part in the defeat of Nazism at a new and elaborately expensive war memorial on Poklonnaya Gora, from which Napoleon had caught his first ill fated glimpse of Moscow.

Shouts of "Hurrah" rang in the air, tanks rolled by, jet fighters screamed overhead and the Russian people, riven by political divisions, were united in remembrance of the 26 million Soviet citizens who had lost their lives and of an army that was unbeatable.

Things have changed since May 1945 and changed further since May 1995. The Afghan war sapped the armed forces of most of their morale, and the Chechen war is eroding that morale to the point of collapse.

It is easy to find young deserters in Moscow all you have to do is call in to the headquarters of the Soldiers Mothers' organisation, a short walk from the dreaded Lubyanka Square headquarters of what once was the KGB and where at one time deserters feared to tread.

Those were dark days indeed, but it is a universal human failing to remember the bright side when shutting out the evil, and this has produced a hankering after the Soviet past with its stability, its frugal but assured living standards and its military might, which gave Russia a proud place in the world as head of the "indestructible union of free republics".

ALL that is now gone. Had it been replaced by something cent, moral and fair, the Russian people might have backed democracy last month and might have been expected to do so again in June.

In all of this the Chechen war has played a major part. Initially, young Russian conscripts were sent to be slaughtered then, with little hope of success on the ground, the air force and artillery subjected Grozny, a city the size of Belfast, to the heaviest bombardment sustained by any city in Europe for 50 years.

War correspondents have described Sarajevo as a "picnic" in comparison. A legacy of Chechen bitterness was forged.

Following another mass hostage Russian town of talks led to a fragile peace punctuated by a series of serious outbreaks, especially since Russia held elections to install its own surrogate government in the breakaway region.

Despite all this the war continues and yesterday's events have, once again, amply illustrated the ineptitude of the Red Army's successors against a ruthless and unprincipled foe.

In the midst of the mess stands Gen Grachev his conduct of the war is obviously open to question he has been accused of involvement in the corruption which was widespread among the Russian officer corps in the former East Germany, an investigation into which led to the murder of a young Moscow journalist.

Yet he, unlike Mr Kozyrev, has held on to his job, mainly, it appears, because of his loyalty to Mr Yeltsin in the abortive coup of August 1991 and the storming of the Russian parliament in October 1993.

If Mr Yeltsin will not dismiss his friend, then a new president almost certainly will, and the likelihood of Russia having a new, perhaps hard line, president has been increased by yesterday's events.