GROZNY -- Ah, the sound of euphemisms dropping off the lips of leading Russian politicians.


Russian soldiers are not shooting at Chechens, we are told; they are simply making an adekvatny otvet, a "suitable response" to the breakaway republic's defiance. Nobody knows, of course, how suitable the chosen response is to the stated goal of making Chechens want to return to the Russian fold. Seems like it would have the opposite effect.


We're told this conflict is not a brutal military confrontation of the Russian state with its own people, but a voyennaya operatsiya po razoruzheniyu, a "military operation of disarmament," although nobody has really collected any arms from any Chechens so far -- at least not any live ones.


Those Russian warplanes aren't bombing Grozny; their task is to nanosit' raketno-bombovye udary po strategicheskim obyektam, to "carry out rocket-bomb strikes against strategic targets."


These strikes are also are being called tochechnye udary, pinpoint strikes. But strategic target Nomer Odin, Dzhokhar Dudayev's presidential palace in central Grozny, is still standing at the time of this writing. Dozens of apartment buildings are not.


We have been told that the military operation is being done very subtly, ne toporom, a skalpelem, "not by the ax, but by the scalpel." Perhaps, although I don't think I'd let my doctor operate on me using heavy tanks.


It's especially uplifting to hear these things exactly 15 years to the day, at the time of writing, after the launching of the last great Russian military adventure. Afghanistan gave us one of the great Soviet euphemisms of our time: Ogranichenny voinsky kontingent, a "limited military contingent." For 10 years that limited contingent fought an unsuccessful war against the mujaheddin, fierce mountain clans united only by their hatred of the Russians.


Bells should be ringing in the heads of folks like General Pavel Grachev at about the volume of the cluster bombs falling in a crowded Grozny residential neighborhood.


But no. They wheel out Oleg Soskovets, who for some reason is in charge of the whole Chechen crisis -- rather than, say, the president. What does he say? Grozny ne podvergsya bombardirovke russkoi aviatsiyei -- Grozny did not undergo bombing by Russian aviation."


Then he suggests that those explosions we thought we underwent were actually a planned diversion by evil Chechens crawling along the riverbank, sharpening their long knives.


An evocative image -- one that even Lermontov might have envied. All the same, I do believe those were Russian warplanes.