By Florian Hassel

MOSCOW (DPA): When more than 150 Russian soldiers surrounded Alleroi, the residents of the mountain village suspected something unpleasant was going to happen. Officially, the soldiers were searching for the Chechen president, Aslan Maskhadov, who hails from Alleroi. But the troops found no trace of him.

So in their frustration, they stole food supplies from shops, the market and private houses. A new report by the Russian human rights organization Memorial says that after days of plundering, drunk soldiers set fire to at least 10 houses. They also detained all the village's men and boys and took them to a local school where the Russians tortured the captives with beatings and electrocutions from a mobile diesel generator, says the Memorial report.

Villager Alimshan Daudov had a machine gun held to his throat and was photographed, quaking for his life, for the soldiers' own amusement. Nine men were shot, says Memorial, including a 17-year-old man from the neighboring village of Tsentoroi. The Russian soldiers are said to be still holding 54 hostages in earth pits outside the village.

This description of a Russian atrocity is only the latest of a series of attacks which the Russian leadership likes to term "clean-up operations" in its supposed search for rebels. In mid- July, Vladimir Moltenskoy, commander in chief of Russia's North Caucasian troops, promised that "we are now pursuing a special operation to rekindle the population's trust in the army."

Moltenskoy's announcement was no coincidence. At the beginning of July, hundreds of Interior Ministry soldiers arrested some 1,500 men in the neighboring villages of Asinovskaya and Sernovodsk.

Many of them were tortured. The soldiers plundered houses, cars and tractors, lobbed grenades into classrooms of the schoolhouse -- empty at the time, thankfully -- and cleared out the safe containing the teachers' pay. The relatives of one of the victims, Ruslan Payzulayev, 38, a deaf mute, told a reporter for the New York Times that he was maltreated with electric shocks.

The assaults on Alleroi, Asinovskaya and Sernovodsk are not isolated incidents; far more, they represent the tip of the iceberg. Every day, reports of small "clean-up operations" reach the Memorial office in the Ingushetian capital Nazran. At the end of the second year of this second Chechen war, Russian troops continue to terrorize and plunder the population with complete impunity.

After the events in Asinovskaya and Sernovodsk emerged, Russia's Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov promptly defended the plundering and torture as "operations which are executed in compliance with the legal norms covering anti-terrorist operations."

But after four respected, pro-Moscow administrative chiefs in Chechnya threatened to resign, Viktor Kazantsev, President Vladimir Putin's special envoy to the Caucasus, apologized for the soldiers' acts.

Yet Russia's soldiery in Chechnya still need fear no investigation into their acts of barbary, let alone punishments. President Putin justified the troops' July 18 assaults on Asinovskaya and Sernovodsk as "a control check on the (new) passport regime."

Unfortunately, Russia's troops are not always able to avoid "rising to the rebels' provocations", which he blamed for the attacks in the first place.

The Chechen rebels have also stuck by their time-honored tactics. Using remote-controlled mines and ambushes they continue to inflict losses on isolated Russian units.

At the beginning of July, Moscow's general staff admitted to the Interfax news agency that 3,433 Russian soldiers had been killed and 10,160 injured by then. Western military experts, however, believe that the losses are two to three times higher. Regardless, disproportionately more civilians are dying than soldiers in Chechnya.

Plausible estimates suggest that tens of thousands of Chechen civilians have lost their lives since the start of the second war at the beginning of 1999. By far the most depart this life at the hands of their Russian "liberators".

Following the latest "clean-up operations", several thousand more civilians have fled to the neighboring Russian republic of Ingushetia, where at least 150,000 Chechens vainly await the end of the war.

Chechens who work with Russians in the local administration live dangerously, too. More than 40 mayors, district bosses and religious leaders have been murdered since the last big military conflicts a year and a half ago gave way to the current guerrilla warfare.

And there is no end to the war in sight. The Russians control the flat north of Chechnya only during the day: at night no one dares leave his base or checkpoint. That means that in the mountainous Argun and Vedeno valleys in the south, the armies at best control the central access routes.

Vedeno Valley, which leads to the former Soviet republic of Georgia is particularly vital to the rebels. In Georgia, the traditional home of the Chechen people, hundreds of the rebel troop -- which is still thought to number several thousand men -- have sought refuge or a break from fighting. The valley is also the route taken by reinforcements heading for rebel leaders Shamil Basayev and Khattab as well as President Maskhadov.

Yet no one can say precisely what the situation in Chechnya is. Moscow-based journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was the last to interview Maskhadov last May, says that the Chechen leader is "in a deep depression".

During another news-gathering assignment in the Vedeno Valley in mid-August, Politkovskaya said she again found "no evidence of fighting. Many of the supposed battles take place only in the minds of the propaganda departments on both sides."

Military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer, meanwhile, predicted a large rebel offensive for the end of June, which Maskhadov had apparently been planning for a year.

Then, at the beginning of August, videos began to circulate in Chechen refugee camps in Ingushetia. On them, Maskhadov could be seen advising his people to return to their homeland because of an imminent offensive.

A week ago, the rebel's propaganda chief Movladi Udugov announced that the fighters had killed around 40 Russian soldiers in battles in the Vedeno Valley giving them control of the regional center, Vedeno. The Russians counterclaimed that several dozen rebels had in fact been killed.

If this really marks the beginning of a large rebel offensive, Maskhadov will be following the course he has outlined to bring the Kremlin round to resuming peace negotiations at long last.

Felgenhauer believes that more and more Russians generals consider the war morally wrong and unwinnable. An influential three-star general told the military analyst in mid-June already that, "We have lost this war and should look to extricate ourselves."

President Putin, though, seems unprepared for any such move. Back in June, Putin blocked the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya he had announced in the spring. There are apparently still more than 80,000 in the southern republic.

"I have been asked whether I shall change my approach to Chechnya and my answer is no," said Putin in mid-July, underlining his stance that, for the moment, talks are not on his agenda.