For the first time since the assault on Chechnya began nearly a month ago, Russian troops are taking land in Grozny and holding it, thanks to a change in tactics that has brought the soldiers out of their trucks and tanks and into the open in sustained building-to-building, street-level fighting.


"Having suffered from gross overconfidence, they are now forced into this," said Charles Dick, a military analyst at the Conflict Studies Research Center of London's Sandhurst College. "It is highly undesirable, but it is the only way of making their point."


As the Russians have learned from seeing their tanks and armored vehicles advance only to be set aflame by rebel Chechens and reduced to charred husks, Grozny will not be theirs until a Russian soldier is posted at every doorway. To achieve that, they need infantry.


"You have to use infantry to take the city bit by bit," said a Moscow-based Western diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "If this were a proper war and the order was to take the city, you would flatten it by bombing it with artillery, and then trundle in and pick up the pieces."


But Chechnya has been anything but a proper war, and Defense Minister Pavel Grachev must be haunted by his words of Nov. 27: "It would be possible to resolve all questions in two hours with one parachute regiment."


The deployment of infantry reinforcements, led by elite units of paratroopers, means the war in Chechnya has reached a crucial period that could see high civilian and military losses.


"You want to reduce your casualties with the use of high explosives, but there is a limit," Dick said. "Once you collapse a building, it becomes more defensible than it was before you made it fall down. It provides a lot of cover and a lot of concealment for the people defending it."


Russian troops, Dick argues, lack the training and resolve to pull off a complete raking of Grozny. "At the end of the day, you have to go into any building you've blown up and clear out any people inside with rifles and bayonets. It's not the kind of thing that any Russian was trained for," he said. "I can see them doing this with considerable reluctance."


The Western diplomat, resorting to a brand of Sovietology recently dormant but now highly useful for deciphering the Byzantine twists of the Chechen operation, said he expected the conflict to be essentially complete by the end of January.


A Jan. 11 speech that Yeltsin was scheduled to deliver to the State Duma has been postponed to the end of the month. In the scheduling, the diplomat said he saw a sign of Russian expectations.


"I conclude from all that that they are planning, (that they are) hoping for the main shooting war to finish by the end of January," he said. It could also be a matter of days, he added.


Should the city conclusively fall into Russian hands, the operation, he predicted, would be given to Interior Ministry troops.