Yeltsin at bay in siege of Pervomayskoye

IT WAS only a tiny detail in a war that has so far claimed 30,000 lives, brought misery to many more, and heaped embarrassment upon the Kremlin. But it will still have sickened the ailing Boris Yeltsin as his stand-off with a band of Chechen rebels yesterday entered its fourth day.

The Russians had scarcely finished celebrating a small victory with the release of eight of the more than 100 hostages held by the Chechens, when they received word that one of them - a woman - had decided to go back. It appears that she preferred to be in the rebels' village stronghold surrounded by Russian tanks, and presided over by the 28-year-old red- bearded separatist leader, Salman Raduyev.

Small though it was, this was yet another humiliation in an episode that must have left Mr Yeltsin yearning to return to the comfort of the woodland sanatorium outside Moscow, where he spent the last year recovering from a heart attack. Once again - this time only six months from a presidential election that he seems likely to contest - the Chechen issue has flared up like a recurring fever.

The crisis started early on Tuesday in Kizlyar, a rambling town seven miles from Chechnya's border with the Russian republic of Dagestan, which stands between the breakaway regions and the Caspian Sea.

Magomed Malacheyev, a young surgeon, was resting in his office in the town's central hospital shortly before dawn when the door flew open and someone bellowed: "The Chechens are coming". Indeed they were - 150 heavily armed fighters, led by Raduyev, who proceeded to take 2,000 people hostage, many of them herded in from a nearby maternity home and surrounding houses.

As battles raged between Russians, local police and the rebels, the hospital was reduced to a bullet-scarred wreck - littered by shattered glass, discarded scraps of half-eaten mutton, bloody dressings, and mattresses which had been used as buttresses against incoming fire.

Hours after the rebels left, the body of a young Russian policeman still lay on the floor of a hospital room, his hands folded on the chest of his blue-grey uniform. No one had bothered to cover the corpse.

The arrival of the Chechens was a shock to Kizlyar, a town of 47,000 which bears all the ugly scars of poverty and post-Soviet collapse. But it was not a surprise. Only a few days earlier, word had reached local administrators that the Chechens were planning an operation, although it was not clear exactly what they would do. Reconnoitring the place was easy enough for the rebels: tens of thousands of Chechens had fled to Dagestan as refugees from the war.

Officials took the warning seriously enough to post a handful of police around the hospitals fearful of a repetition of the debacle at Budennovsk in southern Russia last June, when Chechen rebels stormed into a hospital and grabbed a thousand hostages.

But such half-measures could never have been a match for Mr Raduyev's men, as they flooded in past the grimy apartment blocks and into the town centre's slushy streets, where they began battering their way into houses. If anything, they only served to increase the death-toll, estimated at 13.

No one in Kizlyar seemed to know exactly how the Chechen fighters got into the town, although they were widely believed to have come along the dry riverbeds that snake across the snow-clad landscape. They arrived in small groups and then massed to attack their main target, a Russian military airfield on the edge of town, where they blew up two helicopters.

What is clear, though, is that seizing the hospital was not their first intention. The Chechens had discovered the Russians were planning to send eight transport planes to the airfield, carrying rockets for use in the war, so they decided to launch a pre-emptive strike. Taking several thousand hostages was a secondary plan, an emergency measure to which they resorted after several of their fighters were injured.

None of this mattered much to the gaggle of angry Dagestani men who gathered in the streets of Kizlyar afterwards. For the Chechens to bring their war with the Russians on to the soil of a neighbouring Muslim republic - and, worse, for them to have involved children and pregnant women - was a betrayal of trust. "Why couldn't they have attacked the Russians?" complained one elderly man as patients were carried from the hospital in their iron beds.

Standing in a dark, cramped apartment opposite the devastated building, Ilmar Remikhanov, 21, was comforting her six-month-old son, with whom she had been seized the day before. She had hidden in the attic when the Chechens arrived but surrendered on seeing that a rocket-propelled grenade was aimed at her home.

"They told us they wanted their own republic. Azerbaijan has done it. Armenia has done it. Why can't they, they said?" A bullet had smashed her kitchen window, lodging in her radio. "They are fanatics, just fanatics," she said shaking her head in disbelief. It was more than 24 hours before she and most of the rest of the hostages were freed and the Chechens rumbled out of town in a convoy of nine buses, taking with them a human shield of more than 100 people, including women and children.

They had reportedly struck a deal with Dagestani officials guaranteeing them safe passage to the border, where they had pledged to set free their captives. If the reports were true, it was a bafflingly flawed agreement.

The landscape of northern Dagestan is as flat as unleavened bread, providing little shelter for the retreating Chechens. With hostages freed, it is hard to believe the Russians would have passed up the chance to wipe out the rebel band as they made the 40-mile journey back to their mountain strongholds. To let them return unchallenged would have infuriated Russia's hardliners in the army and in the parliament, who have been baying for revenge.

So it was perhaps inevitable that the convoy ground to a halt on Wednesday morning only a few yards from the Chechen border in the farming village of Pervomayskoye after the deal broke down.

Witnesses say the convoy had just crossed the border and was in fields surrounded by Russian forces when several helicopters opened up with machine- guns. At that moment a helicopter landed carrying 37 interior ministry (Omon) troops from Novosibirsk in Siberia. Fearing an ambush, the Chechens promptly captured the Omon soldiers and retreated to the village. The siege of Pervomayskoye had begun. Russian tanks, field guns, armoured personnel carriers and truckloads of troops rumbled in. President Yeltsin had another crisis on his hands, and one which can only damage him - whatever the outcome.

After the Budennovsk raid last June, hope was kindled that the Russians were so humiliated by the episode that they would feel compelled to make a serious effort to reach a peace deal in Chechnya, where their merciless bombardment of Grozny had horrified the world.

Since then the Chechen rebels have added to their list of grievances last month's blatantly fraudulent election, which returned the Kremlin's puppet regime to power in the republic.

As the bodies stack up, both sides in this conflict now appear entrenched, trapped in the cycle of revenge and rhetoric.

Mr Yeltsin may have meant it when he announced that the "bandits must not escape punishment". But he knows it would only create martyrs whose boots would soon be filled by other young Chechen men. As a remarkably relaxed Raduyev emphasised last week, when I crossed Russian lines to interview him, his fighters are not afraid to die.

Meanwhile the Avar people watch with mounting anger as helicopters clatter overhead and tanks move around the fields.

"We need Stalin to sort these terrorists out," said Gami Dulakh, an elderly villager, before kneeling down for his morning prayers. It is a sentiment that one hears so often in Russia these days that it is difficult to pay it much attention But when it drops from the lips of a Muslim in the Caucasus - where Stalin caused so much suffering - it is a chilling measure of the division that this war has caused.