Word: chechnya
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...talk about peaceful solutions, it is not clear what kind of compromise can be negotiated. Last week Chechnya's president Jokhar Dudayev, decked out in camouflage fatigues, held a press conference on the southern outskirts of Grozny to call for a halt to the fighting. There was no military solution to the crisis, he said, and peace could be agreed on "in a day, in an hour, at the stroke of a pen." But Dudayev, a former Soviet air force general, waffled when asked if he would drop his demand for independence and settle for autonomy inside the Russian Federation...
...Russian President must be aware that Chechnya has been a political catastrophe for him. The question is what lessons he will draw from the experience. Will he conclude that restive provinces across Russia can be held in check only with an iron fist? He could be feeling so isolated and friendless that he will throw in with hard-line loyalists in the Defense Ministry and the intelligence services...
...place it directly under the President. This would make Yeltsin commander in chief of the armed forces and leave to the ministry basic but poorly handled tasks such as training and supplying them. Such a move could only be a slap at the military leadership's demonstrated incompetence in Chechnya and an indicator that Grachev was about to be eased out. But the confusion increased a few hours later when Yeltsin's press secretary said no decision had been made...
Meanwhile, more capable Russian military reinforcements were streaming into Chechnya to join the 40,000 draftees struggling to take the capital. Crack marine units and front-line troops arrived from the North Sea Fleet and Kaliningrad -- the slice of Russia between Poland and Lithuania -- while soldiers and even sailors were flown in from Vladivostok in the far east...
...hand to meet some of them on the Russian border of Chechnya was Grachev. In a meeting with reporters, he seemed on the defensive, denying he was in a panic to take Grozny. "Have I been telling you about a blitzkrieg?" he asked. "This I certainly never did." On the contrary, said Grachev, rushing the campaign in Chechnya "would only lead to heavy personnel losses." Besides, he said, the President had decreed that an effort be made to limit civilian casualties, so the army was refraining from "using indiscriminately all the firepower we have...