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One reason for the stubbornness may be that the same military leadership is in charge in Moscow, and they claim to have learned from their previous failures. More important, they claim to have learned from NATO's almost casualty-free successes in Kosovo. Last week, before a blackout descended on military news, Moscow TV carried cockpit footage of a Russian smart missile destroying its Chechen target. It'll be a nice short offensive, General Valery Manilov of the General Staff declared cheerfully. If the troops move "energetically," he predicted, "we won't have to winter there."
Not many others are so optimistic. Russian critics of the military say the troops are moving into Chechnya too late in the year. Within a few weeks ground operations will be slowed by mud, then halted altogether by snow, while air operations will be hampered by low-hanging mists. "Military strategy says you should never, never initiate a ground operation with winter approaching," commented Alexander Zhilin, a former Russian fighter pilot and now a military analyst for the weekly Moscow News. "I am afraid there are going to be massive casualties." Former Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin, a hawk during the last war, is much more cautious. A ground offensive, he warned, could lead to "political catastrophe."
Russian commanders have, in fact, learned nothing at all since the first Chechnya war. Officers and NCOs who took part in battles last month against Chechen rebels in western Dagestan described their own commanders as corrupt, ill-organized and incompetent. Sources close to the Spetsnaz, the best-trained and most combat-experienced soldiers, say they lost officers to misdirected Russian "precision bombings" in Dagestan. They also speak of corrupt commanders who allowed Chechen leader Basayev to buy his way out of Dagestan after a failed offensive, and of helicopter-gunship crews who were bribed by the Chechens to hit empty slices of mountainside instead of guerrilla positions.
What's really driving the war machine is not military necessity or strategic calculation or even the fear of terrorist attack. It is the Kremlin's politics of survival. Russia's leaders are waging a war of succession, designed by Kremlin imagemakers to prove to the Russian electorate that Prime Minister Putin, a former KGB lieutenant colonel hastily slapped into office by Yeltsin two months ago, is a real man, capable of leading Russia as President when Yeltsin steps down next year. The Kremlin logic is clear: Putin fights a short, brilliant war, his popularity rockets, and Yeltsin backers pump millions of dollars into the presidential campaign. Putin is elected and protects Yeltsin's family and hangers-on from prosecution for corruption. Last week Yeltsin, once again invisible and by some reports dangerously ailing, sent out word that he fully approves of Putin's "decisiveness" in handling Chechnya.