The fall of Gudermes and Shali, the last military strongholds of the forces of Chechen President Dzhokhar Dudayev, means that Russian troops now control some 80 percent of the breakaway republic. The plains and North Caucasus foothills are in Russian hands, with only the mountainous southeast corner of the region remaining as a launching point for further resistance inside Chechnya.


Congratulations are not in order.


Indeed, any backslapping that might be going on in the Defense Ministry to celebrate the culmination of nearly four months of bloodshed and destruction is premature. To assume that the Chechens, whose reputation as tenacious warriors has been proved over centuries, will simply roll over and accept defeat, would be naive.


Quite how events will develop over the coming months is impossible to predict. But one thing is certain: The war is far from over. And after seeing their country laid waste, their towns bombarded and members of their families slaughtered, the likelihood of the average Chechen accepting Moscow's rule seems far more remote now than before the war started.


Moscow is now talking about rebuilding the shattered region. We'll see. This is crucial work and should start as soon as possible to preempt epidemics and further suffering. But the cost of building Grozny from its ashes and getting the economy going again will be enormous, and there are too many other demands on the government budget -- first of all the cost of continuing war -- to make it likely any time soon.


More than that, seen from the vantage point of a Russian hawk, the benefits of rebuilding a capital for Chechnya are less than zero.


The Russians are still saying there can be no talks without total surrender by the Chechen fighters. By doing so they are shooting themselves in the foot. In the end they must know this is a war they will never win. The question is how many months or years it takes to admit it and look for another path to stop the fighting.


Perhaps the immensely superior Russian forces will eventually succeed in killing or capturing Dudayev, but there will be no shortage of resistance leaders to replace him. The army probably will succeed in pushing most of the fighters into the hills -- and in their best possible scenario, could even manage to stamp out organized guerrilla resistance.


But Russian soldiers would be left with a never-ending low level conflict to make a British soldier's tour of duty in Northern Ireland look like a holiday. Because, for the Chechen fighters and civilians alike this is not a war about Dudayev. It is a war about their own pasts and futures.