MOSCOW, Nov 1: The Kremlin conceded on Thursday that nearly 3,500 Russian soldiers and 11,000 rebel fighters have been killed in Chechnya in a 25-month war that officials again vowed would continue until the last rebel was dead.

A Kremlin spokesman responsible for information on Chechnya told AFP that 3,438 Russian soldiers had died and another 11,661 had been injured since Moscow launched its “anti-terrorist” operation on October 1, 1999.

The office of Sergei Yastrzhembsky gave no estimates of civilian casualties, which human rights group fear may stand in the tens of thousands.

The spokesman added that between 1,500 and 2,000 rebels, many of them mercenaries from Arab states, were still operating in the republic, primarily in the southern mountains which have served as the fighters’ base since the start of the war.

The official toll has been consistently disputed by Russia’s Soldiers’ Mothers Committee, which, quoting hospital and morgue documents, says that the true casualty figure may be three times higher than Moscow admits.

The latest toll approaches the number of casualties from the 1994-96 war, which ended with a humiliating withdrawal of federal forces that granted Chechnya de facto independence.

A senior Russian commander in that campaign, General Alexander Lebed, later estimated that up to 80,000 people were killed in Chechnya in the first, 19-month war.

Lebed then encouraged former president Boris Yeltsin to sue for peace, with the retired Kremlin chief later describing the offensive as the gravest political mistake of his career.

But federal forces rumbled back into Chechnya after a series of rebel incursions into the neighbouring Russian republic of Dagestan and a wave of September 1999 apartment bomb blasts that killed nearly 300 people.

The attacks on civilians were pinned on Chechen rebels, although direct proof has never been presented to support the claims, and separatist leaders deny all responsibility.

Representatives of Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov — whose rule is no longer recognized by Moscow — and President Vladimir Putin in recent weeks have held a series of telephone consultations in an effort to set up the first direct negotiations since the start of the second campaign.

However Moscow has made the Chechens’ complete disarmament a pre-condition for any future ceasefire. The demand has been flatly rejected by the rebels and it appears unclear how the two sides plan to bridge their differences.

Reaffirming Russia’s tough line, the head of the pro-Moscow administration in Chechnya dismissed recent speculation that federal forces were scaling back the offensive in hope of seeing the two sides launch talks.

“The anti-terrorist operation will not be stopped, and we are continuing our work in this respect in full,” RIA Novosti quoted Stanislav Ilyasov as saying.

Moscow has further been encouraged by recent sentiments in Washington and London, which have both scaled down their criticism of Putin’s campaign following the September 11 terror strikes on Washington and New York.

Russian news agencies reported that federal forces had “liquidated” 14 fighters and arrested another 36 under suspicion of being rebel supporters over a 24-hour span ending Thursday morning.—AFP