The attacks were a clear sign that Yeltsin intended to keep using force against Chechnya and seemed to fly in the face of his address to the nation on Tuesday. The about-face is the latest in a series of blatant discrepancies between the government line on Chechnya and the facts as reported by the media.
As Russia's Choice leader Yegor Gaidar put it Wednesday: "My impression is that we are living in different worlds of information."
The government position, reinforced by Yeltsin himself, is that Russian armed forces have achieved the first stage of their operation to disarm illegal armed groups in Chechnya and encircle the city, with the overall aim of restoring order, guaranteeing human rights and ending the illegal seizure of power in the region.
But reports from the region, carried in the Russian press and television, say Chechen fighters are in control of much of the country and that the two main roads running east and west from Grozny remain open and unchecked by Russian forces. The media have also given detailed coverage of the dissatisfaction in the army over the campaign, the destruction of towns and villages and the plight of refugees.
The government position appeared to lose all credibility last Thursday when the Provisional Information Center denied that Russian planes had bombed residential areas in central Grozny early in the morning.
Instead, officials laid the blame on Chechen leaders whom they said blew up buildings to look as if Moscow was killing civilians. Grozny that day was swarming with foreign and Russian journalists and television crews, many of whom caught the sound of jets and the explosions on camera.
In his speech to the nation Tuesday, Yeltsin also threw in the sort of wild comment more in keeping with the style of Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev.
Clearly irritated by all the bad press he has been receiving on Chechnya, Yeltsin said he was aware that "Chechen money pays for the functioning of some Russian mass media." Such a remark, as the president must have been aware, carried more than a hint of a possible crackdown on the press.
The Russian media's determination to exercise its relatively newfound freedom is far beyond the control of the special government press center set up to organize the dissemination of information.
The government has yet to employ the extreme methods that caused Belarussian newspapers to come out last week with broad white spaces where text had been censored.
But a quiet word in a well-placed ear is being used, Russian journalists say.
The Foreign Ministry also sent out notices to all foreign news organizations advising them to withdraw personnel from Grozny last week. One foreign broadcaster was also warned verbally that it risked losing its license to work in Russia if it continued working out of Grozny.
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