One of the most disturbing aspects of the Chechen crisis is that when Defense Minister Pavel Grachev said last week that he did not know of the presence of any regular Russian soldiers on Chechen soil, he may even have been telling the truth.


Grachev was being grilled by reporters on Chechnya after the failed opposition assault Nov. 26 on Grozny, in which at least 21 Russian soldiers were captured. The soldiers had said the night before on television that they were regular troops. With phenomenal cheek Grachev brushed the question off and said that he "hadn't been thinking much" about Chechnya recently and that no Russian ordinary soldiers were involved in the fighting.


Grachev has made so many outrageous denials that he deserves little sympathy for remarks like that. But Russian policy on Chechnya has been so ragged that it is conceivable -- and quite scary if true -- that some of the major policy players have been acting behind each other's backs.


President Boris Yeltsin has had at least four main voices in his ear on the Chechen question over the last few months. All of them have been peddling their own line and doubtless dreaming of the glory of being "the man who solved the Chechen question."


First there have been the opposition-lovers. Sergei Shakhrai, the original architect of the Kremlin's policy, has been promoting links with the whole of the Chechen opposition, up to and including Ruslan Khasbulatov. Sergei Filatov, Yeltsin's chief of staff, has been plugging the cause of the Provisional Council and its leader Umar Avturkhanov, someone most Chechens had not even heard of a year ago.


Then there are the opposition-haters. Vladimir Shumeiko, one of Yeltsin's closest allies, has been saying for a long time that Yeltsin should meet Dudayev and solve the thing at a president-to-president level. Nikolai Yegorov, Shumeiko's friend and the new nationalities minister, has also urged Yeltsin to forget about the opposition. Yegorov seems to be in favor: He was made a deputy prime minister Wednesday.


To this Babel of opinion we can now probably add a difference of views between the Federal Counterintelligence Service, or FSK, and the Defense Ministry. Izvestia has established fairly incontrovertibly that the 21-plus Russian soldiers sent to attack Grozny on Nov. 26 were sent by the FSK. Now it has to be asked why on earth the operation was such a fiasco.


This column is usually the sworn enemy of conspiracy theories, but it must be said the Nov. 26 operation has all the hallmarks of a podstavka, a setup.


Consider the evidence. Three detachments of men attacked Grozny from different sides. There were only a handful of Russians involved and none of them were elite troops. One said he had only been in the army seven months and did not even know where he was going. The three separate columns did not coordinate with each other. They had no radio contact among themselves or with a central command. In fact no one can confidently say whether there was a central command. In short the whole assault was so misconceived that it was either planned by a complete incompetent or planned to fail.


Whether or not it was a setup, the failed attack did two things. It demonstrated the extent of Dudayev's defenses and it dealt a crushing blow to the opposition. The hawks claimed the initiative and three days later Yeltsin issued his ultimatum.


If Grachev did not know about Russian involvement in the attack it is consistent with his dovish position of recent days. Maybe, as someone who fought in Afghanistan, he appreciates the foolhardiness of a military intervention. That is reassuring.


What is not reassuring is the impression that Kremlin policy is being made on the hoof by a half-a-dozen people at once who do not agree. This obviously raises the chances of some kind of intervention simply happening by mistake.


Some people have drawn a parallel with Gorbachev and the Baltic States in 1990, in which an out-of-touch, badly briefed president sleepwalked into using tanks to solve his problems.


It is a tempting comparison, but there is one cheering factor which makes this crisis different from that of 1990-91. It is the role of the media. NTV television, Izvestia and Segodnya have all remorselessly exposed the lying of the Defense Ministry and shown the aftermath of the bombing raids. They have done their part to undermine resolve for what would be a catastrophic invasion.