An Interior Ministry unit from President Boris Yeltsin's home region in the Urals has returned home after refusing to serve in Chechnya -- where it was sent, without advance warning, to find inhuman conditions and an absence of military command, a unit spokesman said Monday.


A member of the OMON police anti-riot squad in the Sverdlovsk region, 1,400 kilometers east of Moscow, who declined to be identified, said in a telephone interview with The Moscow Times that he was one of 100 OMON to return from Chechnya without permission.


"We were poorly armed, we did not have enough food or heat. We had to sleep in trenches, and, finally, we were given no specific orders," the officer said. "Therefore we said we were coming back."


"They were just left to their fate and decided not to put up with this barbarous treatment," said Major Valery Inozemtsev, head of the police trade union for the Sverdlovsk region. "It was just lawlessness."


Aleksei Petrenko, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, refused to comment.


The officer from the unit said they had been transported Dec. 2 from Yekaterinburg to Rostov-on-Don, 600 kilometers south of Moscow, and then to Beslan, North Ossetia.


"We were told we were being transferred on Interior Ministry duties," he said. "There was not a single word about Chechnya."


After a few days they found themselves 10 to 20 kilometers from the Chechen capital, Grozny, armed with Kalashnikov submachine guns and truncheons, with five out-of-date armored vehicles and without any maps, he said.


"We established three posts, but we were given no exact orders on what to do," he said. "We did not even have an order to open fire, and no one knew where other police posts were situated."


The officer said that on New Year's Eve they were ordered to repulse an attack by 14 Chechen tanks.


"My heart sank. We just had to let the tanks pass by, without trying to stop them, because we had no antitank guns," he said.


He said that although the tanks were subsequently destroyed by Russian helicopters, this and many other incidents -- including "a senseless" rocket bombardment of a neighboring village -- convinced him "there is no centralized control over the military operation."


He said local administrations and civilians were very hostile. Ingush and Chechen women and children blocked roads where Russian troops were attempting to advance.


"They looked us in the eye and called us fascists and promised to slaughter us," he said.


The officer said his unit had been seriously short of food, and their living conditions had been "inhumane."


"There was no hot food at all," he said. "I saw myself how some Russian soldiers killed five dogs for lunch, because their soup had worms in it."


He said they lost patience after being told their mission was being prolonged another three weeks, until Jan. 26.


"We informed our leadership that we were not going to be there any longer, and came back," he said.


Inozemtsev said the ministry had ordered another 100 men to replace them.