COMBINED REPORTS


GROZNY -- Russian infantry, backed by heavy artillery, advanced from house to house through shattered streets in the heart of Grozny on Monday, as Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin was reported to have arranged a two-day truce to allow the dead to be retrieved from the streets of the Chechen capital.


Although Russian troops still met stiff resistance from fighters holed up in the smoldering ruins of the presidential palace, the latest moves represented dramatic progress for the Russian forces, which after the fighting over Orthodox Christmas weekend have finally succeeded in keeping a grip on the center of the city.


Sergei Kovalyov, the Russian government's human rights commissioner, said he had discussed a two-day cease-fire with Chernomyrdin by telephone on Monday, and that the prime minister had won agreement in principle from President Boris Yeltsin, Defense Minister Pavel Grachev and other officials.


"Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin are ready to guarantee the cease-fire," Kovalyov said in a telephone conversation from Nazran, the capital of Ingushetia. "It is possible this already will happen tomorrow."


The government's press office told reporters it had no precise information about the issue and was checking Kovalyov's report. No orders to halt fire have been issued, a spokesman said.


The truce was also reported by Sergei Yushenkov, the head of the Duma's defense committee.


Kovalyov said that he would relay the Russian position to Chechen leaders in Grozny on Tuesday and added that Chernomyrdin views the truce as the beginning of a larger negotiation process to end the crisis. Previous efforts to resolve the conflict through talks have ended in failure.


In Grozny, television pictures showed tanks within a few hundred meters of the presidential palace, until recently the headquarters of President Dzhokhar Dudayev. Defenders armed with grenade launchers fired round after round from gaping holes in the masonry of the heavily shelled building.


"The Russians have the train station and the central market but we still hold the presidential palace. Sometimes it's burning but we are still inside," Chechen fighter Hamzat Behoyev, 40, said Monday morning.


There was a lull in the fighting around midday after a night of intense firing in Grozny, much of which has been destroyed since Yeltsin sent troops into the region Dec. 11 to crush Chechnya's three-year old bid for independence. A correspondent for Interfax in Grozny said Russian forces, advancing from the north, west and southwest, now controlled two thirds of the city.


The Russian use of infantry -- led by elite units of paratroopers -- appeared to mark a change in tactics from a disastrous New Year's Eve tank-led push on the city. But television pictures showed dozens of newly captured Russian prisoners, while tanks seized by Chechen fighters maneuvered into position outside the palace.


"The Russians attacked toward the palace from the train station yesterday afternoon and we took a lot of them prisoner," Umar Aliyev, 29, told reporters Sunday. "They had tanks and parachute troops and special forces, but we captured some of their vehicles and drove them back."


Russian government statements said troops had "blockaded" the palace and that Dudayev had left Grozny last Friday for southern Chechnya. They said he was heading for the mountain settlement of Galanchezh. There was no independent confirmation of the reports.


Outside Grozny, Interfax said Chechen fighters had captured a unit of Russian paratroopers 30 kilometers southwest of the city and that Russian commanders were threatening to bomb the area unless they were released. Villagers were being evacuated from the area.


Officials in the neighboring republic of Ingushetia said they had seen at least 75 heavy tanks passing through the region on their way to Chechnya early Monday morning.


Russian warplanes bombed villages in the south of Chechnya, Ekho Moskvy radio station reported Sunday. It gave no details of damage or casualties.


Statements by various Russian officials, quoted by Interfax, put the death toll in the Chechen operation by late Friday at 256 servicemen and about 2,500 Chechen fighters. Official government figures said Russian forces had also destroyed 66 armored vehicles and 63 artillery pieces and mortars. Government figures have not in the past, however, proved reliable.


Yeltsin allies continued to defend the operation, saying the Kremlin leader was upholding the country's fragile constitution.


"The operation will be conducted to the end, with a positive outcome," Anatoly Dolgolaptyev, deputy chairman of the upper house of parliament, told NTV. "The army has shown moral courage and is performing in worthy fashion."


At a meeting of the Security Council in Moscow on Friday, Yeltsin demanded to be told if his orders to stop the bombing of Grozny had been carried out. Reports from Grozny have testified to continued air raids, despite the president's pledges last Wednesday and the previous week to stop the bombing.


"We must clear up why we have such an ambiguous picture whether the bombing of Grozny was stopped in accordance with my decision or whether it wasn't," Yeltsin told the meeting. There was no clear response.


Earlier the same day, the president held talks with Kovalyov, who told reporters that he had appealed to Yeltsin at that point for a cease-fire over the Russian Orthodox Christmas weekend. "But Boris Nikolayevich said: 'That's too early.'"


After his talks with Yeltsin, Kovalyov flew back to the troubled region, where he had spent three weeks before flying to Moscow on Thursday.


Criticism of Yeltsin's actions is becoming more blunt. The popular and outspoken General Alexander Lebed, commander of the 14th Army in the Russian-majority Transdnestr region of Moldova, told the Italian radio station RAI on Sunday that the Chechen operation was a "criminal failure."


"The Kremlin has chosen the criminal and most stupid way to resolve the problem," RAI quoted him as saying. "Our troops down there are nothing but an undistinguished and badly organized rabble of men who, without knowing each other or where they were going, were thrown into tanks and sent to die."