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Fighting rages in bloody new phase of Chechnya war

MOSCOW: Battles raged on Saturday in what has become one of the bloodiest phases of the five-month-long Chechen war, despite Russia's announcement earlier this month that its forces had all but achieved victory.

The Chechen rebel Internet website kavkaz.org denied Russian reports that top guerrilla commanders had been killed, and quoted one of them, the Arab-born Khattab, as saying Russia would soon find out how "dead" guerrillas fight.

Furious week-long battles continued near the high mountain villages of Ulus-Kert and Selmentausen, and near Komsomolskoye in the lower foothills further north.

Video footage of Komsomolskoye showed aircraft blasting a ruined landscape, while crack Russian troops made their way through the rubble.

A reporter for NTV television at the scene said Russian artillery had opened fire in the early morning.

He said up to 1,500 Chechen fighters were believed holed up in the village. Earlier this week Russia said only 25-30 fighters were in the village, but officials have revised their figures upwards, contradicting earlier assertions that guerrillas could no longer field large units.

Russia acknowledged on Friday that 156 of its servicemen had been killed over the past week, making it one of the bloodiest weeks of the war.

Many of the recent dead, including 20 paramilitary police killed last week in an ambush near the capital Grozny and an entire company of 84 paratroops wiped out near Selmentausen, were among Russia's finest elite troops.

The setbacks began within days of a Russian announcement that it had wiped out organised Chechen resistance, and have raised doubts over whether Russia is close to pacifying the separatist region despite five months of all-out warfare.

Russia now has nominal control of virtually all Chechen territory, but the rebels have repeatedly seized villages previously held by Russian troops, forcing them to storm them again at great cost.

The rebels say they are fanning out throughout Chechnya to stage partisan raids on Russian positions.

BLAIR PLAYS DOWN CHECHNYA ON VISIT British Prime Minister Tony Blair became the first Western leader to meet Vladimir Putin since the acting Russian president took office at the New Year.

Chechnya was to be on the agenda, but the emphasis during the visit on cooperation rather than confrontation.

"I believe we and the European Union should never forget that a closer partnership between the European Union and Russia is in the interest of all our people and in the interests of the continent we share," Blair said before his departure on Friday.

"The way to conduct ethical foreign policy in these circumstances is to complain about abuses that occur and make sure action is taken," he told BBC television. "But it is still right that Britain has a strong relationship with Russia."

The West has criticised the war in Chechnya, but leaders, led by the Clinton administration in the United States, have been careful not to alienate Putin, drawing criticism from U.S. Republicans and human rights groups.

Blair's meetings with Putin come just two weeks before an election when the former KGB spy, who has built his popularity on militarist rhetoric and tough conduct of the war, is expected to be confirmed as Russia's president for the next four years.

A delegation of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe also flew to southern Russia to tour a Russian jail for suspected Chechen rebels and other sites in the war zone. -Reuters