MOSCOW, Nov 20 (AFP) - President Vladimir Putin said Monday that Russia must avoid seeking "victory at any cost" in Chechnya, raising the specter of allowing the brutal 13-month offensive in the rebel republic to drag on.

Putin's comments were in stark contrast to his promise during the spring presidential campaign to deliver a lighting strike that would crush Islamic rebel fighters in the volatile North Caucasus.

The Russian leader warned the army was no longer combat-ready and would have to be radically restructured if it was to have any chance in future of winning the second Chechen war. Some 2,600 hundred Russian soldiers have already been killed in the offensive, said Putin before lashing out at senior generals for infighting. "We cannot afford even the slightest crack to appear between the military branches," said Putin. "We do not need a victory at any cost.

Focusing on Russian army reform, Putin declared that the number of senior military commanders who have had any previous battlefield experience "could be counted on the finger of one hand." He added that less than one third of field commanders had any secondary education. "The current state of the armed forces does not correspond to either the goals or the size of the tasks set before them," Putin said.

Military analysts intepreted Putin's address, made at an annual conference of top Russian commanders, to mean that he was preparing Russians for a long drawn-out campaign in Chechnya.

"I am concerned by Putin's statement. The longer the situation remains unresolved, the more casualties, including those among civilians, we will carry," said Yury Gladkevich of the AVN military news agency. "Putin does not now seem prepared to take measures that will quickly end the war," he said.

In the past, the Russian leader had often vowed he would swiftly rein in the breakaway republic, on one occasion even threatening -- in criminal underworld slang -- to "wipe out (the rebels) while they are sitting in the outhouse".

Those comments played well with a public eager for stability and still frightened by a wave of apartment block blasts that killed 292 people across Russia in September 1999, and which authorities blamed on Chechens.

However since launching a ground assault the following month, Moscow has struggled to secure a political solution that might allow it to stamp authority on the enclave.

A recently elected Chechnya deputy to Russia's State Duma lower house of parliament told AFP that Putin had personally assured him Moscow would never let the republic to break free. "I met Putin, and he reassured me that Chechnya will always remain a Russian subject," Aslambek Aslakhanov said.

And in a local television address aired late Sunday, Akhmad Kadyrov -- the top pro-Moscow official in Chechnya -- accused separatist President Aslan Maskhadov of being the head of a criminal and illegitimate state. "He remains the chief organizer of terrorist acts, and all responsibility for terrorism lies on him," Kadyrov said.

However, the Russian military was later forced to deny that Kadyrov himself had narrowly escaped injury when his entourage came under fire from an unidentified source.

Both Russian troops and separatist Chechen rebels -- who refuse to recognize the Moscow-appointed government and have put a price on Kadyrov's head -- have been known to attack the chief administrator.

With guerrilla warfare spreading across the North Caucasus, Moscow-appointed officials have become one of the separatist rebels' prime targets.

AFP