Chechen bloodbath makes hollow victory

PSKOV - The last stand of a company of paratroopers from the Pskov Airborne Division on a fog-shrouded hilltop in Southern Chechnya began just hours after the Russian Defence Minister had assured his Government that the Chechen war was over.

In a savage six-hour battle Chechen guerrillas overran the paratroopers, killing 85 of them and leaving just one survivor. Russian reinforcements were caught in a minefield and failed to break through. In the last moments of the fighting the Russian commander, his legs blown off and seeing most of his men dead or wounded, called down artillery fire on his own position. It was one of the worst Russian defeats since the war in Chechnya started six months ago. It was all the more embarrassing because the guerrillas closed in on the doomed men from the 104th Paratroop Regiment from Pskov on February 29, at the very moment that Marshal Igor Sergeyev, the Defence Minister, was appearing on Russian television to claim military victory in Chechnya.

Sergeyev, a jowly, thickset officer, was back in Pskov on Wednesday to attend the funeral of eight of the soldiers who died. Standing outside the Trinity Cathedral, he left it to one of his staff to explain why he had at first said that only 31 paratroopers had died.

In fact Pskov, an ancient but impoverished garrison city in northwest Russia, has lost 110 soldiers killed in just two battles in Chechnya in the past three weeks. This is just 10 short of the total number of soldiers from Pskov killed in the whole of the last Chechen war in 1994-96, according to journalists at Pskovskaya Pravda, the local newspaper, who first broke the news that the official casualty figures were untrue.

The Army is still refusing to explain exactly how the Chechen fighters, supposedly routed, were able to pin down an entire company for six hours and wipe it out before reinforcements could arrive.

Despite the secrecy, the facts about the lost battle are beginning to emerge. On the evening of February 29 the 6th Company of the 104th Regiment, led by Colonel Mark Yevtukhin, was told to occupy a hilltop near the village of Ulus-Kert. The plan was to stop guerrillas escaping from the nearby Argun Gorge, the scene of heavy fighting over the past month.

The paratroopers found some guerrillas were already on the hill. Their number grew rapidly and they began to attack. As they did so they offered Colonel Yevtukhin a deal. They contacted him by radio and suggested he let them escape without fighting.

Yevtukhin rejected the deal and the Chechens immediately assaulted the hilltop. After two hours' fighting his men were running low on ammunition and he pleaded on his radio for reinforcements. These immediately ran into a minefield and had to withdraw. Because of the mines, General Alexander Lentsov, the commander of all paratroops in Chechnya, refused to commit more men. Colonel Yevtukhin, his legs blown off by a mine, called down artillery fire on his own position.

The loss of the paratroop company came a week after 25 men from the city were killed in another battle in Chechnya. Julia Kalinina, a 25-year-old blond, says that when her doorbell rang on February 22 she hoped it was her husband, Alexander, a captain in a reconnaissance unit, coming home. She said: "When I opened the door I saw a colonel and two other officers. I didn't hear what they said, because I knew what had happened at once."

She said the Army had told her nothing about what had happened to Alexander, though his friends had told her he was shot through the head when he tried to rescue men from a damaged armoured personnel carrier.

- INDEPENDENT