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personal meeting with Yeltsin, and Korzhakov refused to set up the meeting unless he was paid.

The brilliant military operation in which a Russian armored column was burnt out was, indeed, not organized by Grachyov, but by director of the FSK Stepashin and head of the Moscow UFSB Savostyanov, who was responsible for handling questions relating to the overthrow of Dudaev s regime and the introduction of troops into Chechnya. Those who expatiated at great length on the crude miscalculations of the Russian military leaders, who had sent the armored column into the city only for it to be destroyed, failed to understand the subtle political calculations of the provocateurs who organized the war in Chechnya. The people who planned the introduction of troops into Grozny wanted the column to be wiped out in spectacular fashion by the Chechens. It was the only way they could provoke Yeltsin into launching a full-scale war against Dudaev.

Immediately after the rout of the armored column in Grozny, President Yeltsin made a public appeal to Russian participants in the conflict in the Chechen Republic, and the Kremlin began preparing public opinion for imminent full-scale war. In an interview for the Russian Information Agency Novosti, Arkady Popov, a consultant with the president s analytical center, announced that Russia could take on the role of a compulsory peacemaker in Chechnya, and that all the indications were that the Russian president intended to take decisive action. If the president were to declare a state of emergency in Chechnya, the Russian authorities could employ a form of limited intervention, which would take the form of disarming both sides to the conflict by introducing a limited contingent of Russian troops into Grozny -exactly what had been tried in Afghanistan. So, having provoked a conflict in Chechnya by providing political

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and military support to the Chechen opposition, the FSK now intended to launch a war against Dudaev under cover of peacemaking operations.

The Chechen side took Yeltsin s statement to be an ultimatum and a declaration of war. A statement issued by the Chechen government confirmed that this statement, and any attempt to put it into effect, were in contravention of the norms of international law, and gave the government of Chechnya the right to respond by taking adequate measures for the protection of its independence and the territorial integrity of its state. In the opinion of the government of the Chechen Republic, the threat of a Russian declaration of a state of emergency on Chechen territory expressed an undisguised desire to continue military operations and interfere in the internal affairs of another state.

On November 30, Grozny was subjected to air strikes by the Russian air force. On December 1, the Russian military command refused to allow into Grozny an aircraft carrying a delegation of members of the Russian State Duma. The delegation landed in the Ingushetian capital of Nazran and set out overland to Grozny for a meeting with Dudaev. While they were traveling to the Chechen capital, on December 1, at about 14.00 hours, eight SU-27 planes carried out a second raid on the Chechen capital, encountering dense anti-aircraft fire in the process. The planes specifically shelled the district of the city where Dudaev lived. According to the Chechen side, one plane was shot down by anti-aircraft defense forces.

On December 2, the chairman of the Duma Defense Committee and head of the delegation that had arrived in Grozny, Sergei Yushenkov, declared that reliance on force in Russian-Chechen relations was doomed to failure. Yushenkov also stated that familiarization with the situation on the ground had convinced him that negotiation was the only possible way to resolve the situation that had arisen, and claimed that the Chechen side had not set any preconditions for negotiations.

Public opinion was still on the side of the Chechens, but the leadership of the FSB had become