Russian warplanes bombed the presidential palace in Grozny on Thursday, less than a day after President Boris Yeltsin ordered a halt to air attacks on the Chechen capital.


Russian fighter jets and helicopters also buzzed other regions in the rebel republic, The Associated Press reported, while street battles continued in the south of the capital.


Previous bombing raids have caused heavy civilian casualties and reduced much of the city to ruins, prompting indignation at home and abroad.


With renewed bombing and street fighting, a pledge from Moscow by Deputy Prime Minister Nikolai Yegorov that Grozny would be"taken without a battle" Thursday proved untrue. Most of the city was reported to be still controlled by Chechen fighters.


Yegorov himself was heading for the city Thursday, the government press service announced in a statement. The statement also declared that Salambek Khadzhiyev, the head of the Russian-backed opposition government, was "beginning work in Grozny." It did not specify where in the Chechen capital the two men were.


More fighting was reported around the railway station in the south of the city and the Russian government's press service said its troops had beaten back three attacks by Chechen fighters in the area. Many Russian soldiers were trapped there after the bungled assault on New Year's Eve. AP also reported that there was still intense fighting in villages west of Grozny.


In Moscow, five days after the failed assault on Grozny, the political battle over Chechen policy is growing still more intense.


The Moscow newspapers, coming out for the first time since the New Year's holiday, splashed a new crop of headlines damning Yeltsin and his policies across their front pages.


Komsomolskaya Pravda, a paper which used to support the president, published a grisly montage of Yeltsin drinking a New Year's toast and the corpses of Russian soldiers in Grozny under the headline "No gunpowder, no truth, no president."


The weekly Moskovskiye Novosti put out a special two-page edition with the headline "we bear witness and accuse" along with pictures of Yeltsin and four of his ministers in charge of Chechen policy.


The paper, without quoting its sources, said about 2,000 Chechen civilians and 1,800 Russian soldiers had died so far in the conflict.


In the same edition, Yeltsin's main liberal critic Grigory Yavlinsky called for early presidential elections and urged the president to resign voluntarily. Yavlinsky said he was "ready to take part in the widest possible coalition of political forces" for new elections.


But critics of the war remain divided on the question of how much Yeltsin himself is conducting the operation or being led by others.


Otto Latsis, the political observer for Izvestia and a member of Yeltsin's presidential council, speculated Thursday that Yeltsin might be in a "pre-Foros situation," in a reference to the imprisonment of former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev in his villa at Foros in the Crimea during the attempted putsch of August 1991. In the preceding months Gorbachev was fed misleading information by a group of aides.


But the president's national security adviser, Yury Baturin, interviewed in Friday's Izvestia, said Yeltsin was in full command of the facts on the operation. However, Baturin himself has not been allowed to take part in meetings of Yeltsin's Security Council on the crisis.


Baturin said the conflict "will not be winnable for the Chechen fighters," but conceded that "partisan activities may start."