Chechen fighters yesterday said they had repulsed a Russian offensive on the separatist republic's capital, Grozny, and killed 60 federal troops in a surprise missile counter-strike.
The Chechen military command said Russian soldiers, pressured by heavy Grad missiles and light artillery fire from Chechen fighters, had retreated several kilometres from the western suburbs of Grozny they had occupied on Monday. The Chechens also reported downing a Russian SU-25 fighter bomber warplane and destroying six armoured vehicles. Grozny made no mention of any Chechen casualties while Russian officials claimed to have killed nearly 60 fighters over a 24-hour span.
Grozny, however, conceded that Russian forces continued to batter the western Pervomayskaya suburb and the northern Grozny district of Staropromyslovskaya with "intensive" artillery fire from hills surrounding the capital.
"A third of Pervomayskaya is already destroyed," said the Chechen command spokesman, Mr Vakha Ibragimov.
Russian defence sources in the main federal military base of Mozdok confirmed meeting Chechen resistance outside the capital but described the fighting as light.
They added that federal troops were also currently moving east on high ground towards the village of Tolstoi-Yurt situated 15 km north of central Grozny.
A Russian contingent composed of several hundred soldiers backed up by tanks moved to the western outskirts of Grozny on Monday in the first such push towards the rebel capital since the two sides' bloody 1994-1996 war.
The Russian command has repeatedly denied that it planned a mass offensive against Grozny similar to the brutal push that killed thousands of civilians during the 21-month Chechen war.
A resumption of hostilities in Russia's volatile southern flank has also sparked consternation in western capitals. The International Monetary Fund has already threatened to cut off assistance to Russia should Moscow boost its military spending in response to the Chechen offensive.
President Yeltsin personally defended the operation in a note to his US counterpart, Mr Clinton, as he vowed to stamp out the "nest of terrorism" in Chechnya.
"Russia became the target of unprecedented attacks from armed bands and terrorists based in Chechnya, unprecedented in their cynicism and violence," Mr Yeltsin told Mr Clinton in the message released by the Kremlin press service.
Mr Yeltsin further called for "close co-operation between Russian and American secret services . . . to cut off at the roots the spread of this infection". Russia also sought western support for the operation during a series of meetings with visiting justice and interior ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) leading industrialised nations.
The Russian Interior Minister, Mr Vladimir Rushailo, after meeting the US Attorney General, Ms Janet Reno, told ITAR-TASS that Washington and Moscow had reached a "full understanding on this question". The latest offensive against Chechnya has won a broader approval from the Russian public, in part because it was sparked by a deadly wave of apartment block explosions that Moscow - without offering any proof - has pinned on Grozny.
It has also boosted the ratings of the Prime Minister, Mr Vladimir Putin, who has been in nominal charge of the operation in the absence of the increasingly absent Mr Yeltsin.
Mr Putin, in addressing the G7 conference, urged a "joint effort at the international level to confront . . . terrorism" - an open code word Russia now uses to describe the Chechen rebels.