Word: yeltsin
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...Yeltsin's fiction of noninvolvement vanished last week. The causes: a botched coup and POWS in danger. A coalition of anti-Dudayev forces had rolled into Chechnya's capital of Grozny in late November only to be repelled by Dudayev loyalists, who claim to have destroyed 20 tanks and killed 350 people in the fighting. They also captured 120 Russian soldiers among the rebels and paraded them on television. Back in Russia, the families of the prisoners identified their kin as members of a Russian army unit. Yeltsin could no longer afford to dissemble. Until then, Moscow had always insisted...
...action from Dudayev, Russian troops began massing on the borders of the mountainous, land-locked region. Meanwhile, Dudayev's opponents sent sophisticated jet fighters -- planes that could never have been procured or even operated without Russian help -- to bomb military bases and the airport in Grozny. To show that Yeltsin really meant business, 30 Antonov An-12 transport planes with soldiers and armor were deployed in the neighboring ethnic republic of North Ossetia...
...Boris Yeltsin may be slow to make decisions, but when he does, watch out. For three years, he has tolerated a secessionist movement in Chechnya, an oil- rich, predominantly Muslim enclave of 1.1 million people in Russia's North Caucasus region. Rather than take direct steps to resolve the impasse with Chechen president Jokhar Dudayev, who champions breaking away, the Kremlin has waged a proxy war against him by giving covert military and financial support to Dudayev's pro-Moscow opponents...
Then, with his fist clenched in the air, the Russian President suddenly softened the bellicose rhetoric. The Kremlin announced that Yeltsin had not actually signed an order imposing a state of emergency in Chechnya. Instead, he offered all Chechens a limited amnesty if they voluntarily handed in their weapons by Dec. 15. Hopes for a settlement focused on a parliamentary delegation that met with Dudayev in Grozny and returned to Moscow with two of the imprisoned Russians...
...Yeltsin has a good deal riding on a speedy resolution of the power struggle in Grozny. It is a test of his authority and political will to hold together a Russian federation of 89 ethnic republics and regions in danger of splitting apart just as the Soviet Union did in 1991. Dudayev's campaign for independence is only the most flagrant example of a growing regional revolt against the central government over issues of local sovereignty and tax policy...