He insisted they had not yet suffered any casualties but would not let journalists go up the hill.He said the Russian tank column was trying to make it way to Grozny after entering Chechnya from the city of Mozdok to the northwest, in the neighboring republic of North Ossetia.. Between the bridge at the village’s northern border where Lieutenant Dolkhayev gazed into the middledistance and at a crest farther on, an old car shuttled back and forth taking the commander’s orders to his men. Inside, the stove was still hot.”This place was used as a soup kitchen for the poor. The cook was seriously wounded and taken to hospital,” he said.The first salvo of shells hit the village during the night but caused no casualties.

“Our only strategic targets are these small guys with automatic weapons,” he said, pointing to truck carrying four young men armed with Kalashnikovs and grenade launchers rushing towards the village “front”.Not far away in the courtyard of the municipal garage, a driver was warming up the motor of a light armored vehicle mounted with an anti-aircraft cannon. Three rockets had slammed into its courtyard, causing the roof of an outbuilding to crumble from the impact. But a neighbour quickly told her, “Quiet down, Dudayev lives near here, too. It’s these Russian bastards who are causing all the trouble.”"Come see, look what they are doing to us,” pleaded Vakhid Assayev, the village’s chief administrator, insisting a journalist follow him into a disused kindergarten. Wrapped in a huge coat and holding her left side, she was carried out of her small, wooden-framed house on a stretcher, her face pale and frozen with shock.Outside another women screamed: “This is all Dudayev’s fault,” referring to Chechnya’s secessionist president, Dzhokhar Dudayev, who has defied Moscow by refusing to retract his three-year-old independence proclamation. Angry residents point to a shell casing dug half-way into the middle of the main street, with shrapnel scattered across a 10-yard zone.”Look, she was only trying to go home, she never asked anything from anyone, and she was even Cossack, almost Russian,” cried one woman.The victim was 66-year-old Lydia Kuznetsova.

Behind, a crowd of shouting villagers tries to hurry along an ambulance.
About a half-hour earlier Russian helicopters made their second attack on Piervomaiskoy, a village of some 5,700 people, wounding two women. A former officer in a Soviet tank unit, he knows what he is looking for as he searches to see if the harrying fire is on target.His lieutenant stands immobile as overhead four Russian fighter planes trace huge circles over the combat zone. His men are har rying acolumn of about 60 Russian tanks trying to advance along a line north of their village to Grozny, eight miles farther east. If he does so, he risks becoming isolated with only the military hawks for his friends..

Piervomaiskoy – Standing at a bridge on the northern crest overlooking this Cossack village near Gronzy, the Chechen capital, local military commander Issad Dolkhayev trains his binoculars on clouds of dust rising in the distance. Deputies from right across the political spectrum voted for the censure motion.”We are moving towards confrontation between a large number of deputies on one side and the executive branch of power on the other,” said a presidential adviser, Emil Pain.”The consequences may be really grave, namely another round of conflict which threatens to result in the disintegration of Russia.”After defeating an armed uprising by deputies of the old Soviet parliament in October 1993, Mr Yeltsin made sure the new assembly would have limited powers.Nevertheless he cannot afford entirely to alienate the Duma, which is tapping into a palpable anti-war mood among the public. Yesterday the State Duma passed a resolution describing his attempts to solve the Chechen crisis as “unsatisfactory”. As a result, the troops are jumpy.Yesterday they fired at a car full of journalists on a road leading into Chechnya, riddling the vehicle with bullets but fortunately harming nobody.Problems also appear to be developing for Mr Yeltsin in Moscow. And Moscow has admitted that at least nine of its men were killed in the first clashes inside Chechnya on Monday.Eyewitnesses say the Russian tank crews look bewildered because they are not being warmly received by the local population, just as young Soviet soldiers could not understand why the Hungarians were not welcoming them in 1956 and the Czechoslovaks in 1968. Yesterday tanks were limping into Chechnya which should have arrived there on Sunday had it not been for resistance put up by the Chechens’sympathetic neighbours, the Ingushis and the Dagestanis.