Russian forces in Chechnya attacked at least three separatist villages Friday as Russia's President Boris N. Yeltsin, ignoring an appeal by President Clinton, allowed a two-week unilateral cease-fire to give way to intensified warfare.
Fighters and civilians on both sides said Yeltsin's truce, although rejected by separatist guerrillas and violated daily by the Russian military, had at least limited the scope and intensity of the five-month-old war in southern Russia."We are in greater danger now that it's over and there are no limits at all," said Magomed El-buz-duk-ayev, a 69-year-old Chechen as he watched two jets swoop low over Duba-Yurt and fire at least two dozen rockets on the farming village's outskirts.
Khalisat Bagayeva, 54, who was weeding a potato garden behind her home, was severely wounded by shrapnel from one rocket and was rushed to a hospital, said one of her seven children.
Duba-Yurt, 21 miles south of the Chechen capital of Grozny, lies in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains - the southern 20 percent of Chechen territory still in the hands of separatists loyal to Gen. Dzhokhar M. Dudayev. He ruled the tiny Muslim republic for three years before the war and declared it independent.
Few separatist fighters were seen in the village Friday, but bursts of automatic weapons fire reverberated in the nearby hills, apparently aimed at the circling jets, which made several passes and dropped yellow flares to distract any heat-seeking missiles.
Russian jets also struck Serzhen-Yurt, 30 miles south of Grozny, while Russian artillery pounded a rebel-held cement factory in Chiri-Yurt three miles north of here.
Serzhen-Yurt, key to the separatists' defense of their nearby alpine headquarters at Vedeno, has been heavily contested for weeks. But the attacks on Duba-Yurt and Chiri-Yurt were fiercer than any during the cease-fire and appeared to foreshadow wider, more intense combat in the highlands.
Yeltsin sent tens of thousands of troops to Chechnya last December to crush its independence drive and by the end of January had ousted Dudayev's fighters from Grozny. Yeltsin declared his truce on April 28, trying to silence Chechnya while dozens of heads of state were arriving in Moscow for Tuesday's 50th anniversary of Victory Day in World War II.
At a joint news conference after their Moscow summit Wednesday, Yeltsin and President Clinton all but sidestepped the Chechen war and its 20,000 dead. At the very hour his forces were launching a tank assault on Serzhen-Yurt, Yeltsin claimed there is no military activity in Chechnya, only a police operation to disarm criminal gangs.
Clinton steered clear of criticizing Yeltsin's war but urged a truce extension to give a mission from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe time to arrange peace talks.
Russian soldiers at checkpoints in Chechnya said Friday their don't-shoot-first orders expired at midnight. Yeltsin aide Viktor V. Ilyushin said the president saw little point in extending it if Chechen fighters were unwilling to cooperate. "If the Chechens had shown understanding, the president would have surely made a different decision," he said.