TIME EUROPE
JANUARY 17, 2000 VOL. 155 NO. 2
Warpath To Power
Vladimir Putin's swift rise to the Russian presidency is threatened as his "victorious little war" stalls in the ruins of Chechnya's capital
By ANDREW MEIER and PAUL QUINN-JUDGE Moscow
In his first pep talk of the New Year with his cabinet members, Vladimir Putin, Russia's Acting President and odds-on favorite to succeed Boris Yeltsin as the leader of Russia, sternly ordered his minions not to waste time campaigning for the March 26 presidential election. His message was clear; he will follow the same formula for popularity that has served him well so far: prosecuting the war in Chechnya.
That bloody conflict, now dragging into its fourth month, is Putin's war. A combination of propaganda and people's anger over Moscow bombings blamed on Chechen terrorists has made the war intensely popular. But it has also become Putin's most dangerous political minefield. The Acting President and his retainers know well that his popularity and credibility hinge entirely on winning it--or at least giving the impression of winning it. What's more, Putin must have his victory before the election and in recent days the odds of success have begun to grow longer than ever.
Last week, the Russian military began by declaring that the end in Chechnya was near. "The counter-terrorist operation," Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev insisted, "is going according to plan." But on Friday, that cheery refrain sensationally faltered. The military command, in an embarrassing bow to reality, announced that the assault on Grozny would be "temporarily halted," and Moscow's top two commanders in Chechnya, Generals Vladimir Shamanov and Gennadi Troshev, would be returned to their former posts and replaced by their deputies--a thinly veiled admission from the General Staff that the federal forces have hit a wall of lead in Grozny.
Moscow's plan was to take Grozny and wind down the war by spring--in time for the elections--leaving the Chechen guerrillas trapped in the southern mountains. But the Russian army still faces stiff resistance both in Grozny and in the mountains, straining its forces and overextending supply lines. Putin and his generals claim that they have learned the lessons of the bloody Chechen campaign of 1994-96. Yet more and more the conflict resembles that quagmire.
The war is also slowly coming home in the form of gruz 200--Russian army slang for corpses. And Putin's public relations machine is faltering. It is becoming harder to hide the gulf between Moscow's upbeat predictions and the bleak reports from Grozny. "Putin needs this war," says Alexander Zhilin, a former fighter pilot and now a defense columnist for the weekly Moskovskiye Novosti. "But most of all, he needs a war with minimal bloodshed." Dispatches on Russian airwaves from the capital, however, depict a lethal landscape: a city where chemical storage tanks have exploded, dispersing toxic clouds of chlorine and ammonia; a city whose main buildings have been booby- trapped, where the defenders have built defensive positions protected by slabs of reinforced concrete linked by tunnels and passages.
Young Russian soldiers tell Russian TV of the "hail of lead" that greets them when they raise their heads above their trenches. They speak of guerrillas who move behind Russian lines with impunity at night. At the same time, the doctors in Military Hospital No. 1458, near the main Russian army base in Mozdok just north of Chechnya, concede they are inundated with wounded. "We are doing all we can, but each day brings us more soldiers who need urgent attention," said Colonel Vladimir Sukhomlinov, head surgeon of the medical service for the troops in Chechnya. Officially, 465 Russian soldiers have been killed and 1,583 wounded since September, but in private officers concede the real losses are two to three times greater.
Despite the upbeat tone of Russian military reports--which foreign journalists are forbidden to check for themselves--the advance has been brutally slow. For weeks, Moscow's forces have tried to shoot and shell their way, block by block, to the heart of Grozny. But the Chechen fighters have been waiting months for the assault. At times their Russian-language propaganda website (www.kavkaz.com) has even complained of the "sluggish" Russian advance on the city. The Chechens move in groups of 10 to 15 men through the maze of streets, courtyards and corridors, or speed from point to point on improvised battle wagons--cars or light trucks with a machine gun or a mortar on the back. Russian troops say that when they identify a Chechen position they call in helicopter or artillery strikes, which means that they are likely to kill civilians sheltering in cellars. Both sides proclaim their concern for the civilians, many of whom are ethnic Russian, mostly old, ill or poor. But neither side is trying hard to help them. MORE
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