PRESIDENT Yeltsin's office has described the election off Aslan Maskhadov as an opportunity for a genuine lasting settlement in Chechnya.

Most of Russia has heaved a sigh of relief that Mr Maskhadov's main opponent, the guerrilla fighter Shamil Basayev, has been defeated. But Chechnya's problems are by no means solved.

If an Irish comparison can be made, Maskhadov is the Michael Collins of the current scenario; a military mastermind whose planning caused the defeat of one of the largest armies in the world by one of the smallest, but also a man who is prepared to compromise on the political front.

And his compromises have not been all that well appreciated at home, especially in the mountain villages from which the rebels launched their final assaults on the towns and cities of the plain.

It was in these villages that Mr Basayev received his greatest support, and although he managed to get only 17 per cent of the vote, this is quite a large bloc for a man who essentially wants to resume the war with Russia unless full independence is granted. The acting president, Mr Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, also took a hardline stance and received 15 per cent of the votes cast.

Those Chechens who fear that their new president is an "appeaser of the enemy" will have been calmed somewhat by his statement at his first press conference that Chechnya is now independent and that the countries of the world, especially Russia, should recognise this.

The Russian foreign ministry was quick to warn that any country which did recognise Chechnya as an independent state would incur the wrath of Moscow to the extent of the severance of diplomatic relations.

Mr Maskhadov's independence declaration should not perhaps be taken at face value by Moscow or the rest of the world, intended as it was for domestic consumption, but the Kremlin, and whoever runs it in the absence of Mr Yeltsin, will undoubtedly have been irked by its unswervingly separatist tone.

Here after all was a man who had been one of the greatest enemies of Russia, a man who had humiliated the Russian army, a man who had agreed to a five-year moratorium on independence claims, virtually proclaiming independence unilaterally and thus breaking, legalistically at least, the peace treaty he had signed with the now-dismissed security chief, Gen Alexander Lebed.

But Mr Maskhadov has not always been a bad boy in the minds of Russian hardliners, nor has he always acted in conformity with the principle of independence for the nations of the Russian and later the Soviet empires.

LIKE most Chechens of his age group, he was born in exile following the wartime expulsion of the nation from its homeland on the orders of Stalin.

He returned from Kazakhstan to forge a military career, one of the contradictions of which was his participation, as a Red Army colonel, in the events in Vilnius in 1991. On that occasion 14 Lithuanian civilians, who were protesting to demand their country's independence from Moscow, were killed at the city's TV tower.

Ironically, Lithuania is now an independent state recognised by countries throughout the world including Russia, while Chechnya is still officially a region which is a subject of the Russian Federation. Russia will use all its diplomatic clout to prevent any such recognition, and there is little doubt that it will be successful.

Resolving the impasse with Russia over the expansion of NATO is far higher on the agenda of the western powers than agreeing to the statehood of a tiny nationality of barely one million people, especially as the war has edged those people from open secularism to the verge of Islamic fundamentalism.

That war, President Yeltsin has admitted, was the greatest of the many mistakes he made during his presidency. Mr Maskhadov's independence declaration stems from that monumental error of sending the young Russian conscripts to their slaughter in the early days of 1995, and of the consequent bombing and shelling which is estimated to have cost the lives of between 50,000 and 80,000 innocent civilians. Such events push even the moderate towards extremism.

Russia is now faced with a nation which has not only fought for its independence, but has also voted for it in an open and democratic election.

Mr Yeltsin has been able to contemplate the break-up of the Soviet Union with ease: it helped after all to rid him of his hated rival, the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev. The possible break-up of the Russian Federation is quite another matter.

Russia's determination to hold on to its Chechen province will be very strong indeed; the West will not want to rock the boat.