In Chechnya, a Chronicle of a Massacre Foretold?

It's not that Russia actually wantsto kill Chechen civilians, but Moscow isn't going to break a sweat to avoid it. The Russian army dropped leaflets on Grozny Monday, warning the remaining civilian population of the Chechen capital to leave by Friday or else "be destroyed." The leaflets offered Chechen civilians safe passage out of the city by a designated route until Saturday, but the extent of that safety remains questionable in light of the ongoing bombing and shelling of the city and of Moscow media reports last Friday that Russian forces had fired on a civilian refugee convoy. "The Russians' track record of giving safe passage to civilians in this conflict isn't very strong," says TIME Moscow correspondent Andrew Meier. "If the Russians actually carry out their threat, a lot of people are going to die."

While Moscow insists that no more than 1,000 civilians remain with the estimated 5,000 Chechen fighters in Grozny, Chechen officials claim the number of civilians is closer to 50,000. Western human rights monitors in the region warned over the weekend that civilians in Grozny face starvation, and were unable to flee because of the constant bombardment. Whether or not a humanitarian catastrophe unfolds in Grozny, the siege of the city may be a sign of a new type of warfare. "This isn't really country against country," says TIME U.N. correspondent William Dowell. "It's Russia fighting against an informal army that isn't clearly answerable to a defined political center, and which the Russians are finding difficult to distinguish from the civilian population." The fate of Grozny's civilians, then, may hold some bad news for civilians everywhere caught in the conflicts of the future.