MOSCOW - President Vladimir V. Putin, who rose to power in late 1999 on the promise he would solve Russia's problem in Chechnya once and for all, does not like to talk about the breakaway republic these days.

For the second time in five years, Russia is waging war to keep the rebel region under its control, but Putin's army is in a quagmire. His aides now say the conflict will drag on for many years, even decades. Military and political observers increasingly doubt that the Kremlin has any strategy for ending the war.

The war Putin undertook to put down Chechen ''bandits'' and the one he finds himself fighting have turned out to be two very different things. The Russian president is having trouble explaining the kind of conflict that Chechnya has become, in which unseen assailants launch deadly hit-and-run attacks on the Russian military from places where no rebels should be.

''I think Putin does not know what to do with Chechnya, and he is probably just drifting,'' said Ruslan Khasbulatov, an ethnic Chechen who is the former speaker of the Russian parliament.

Last month, Moscow was forced to halt a planned withdrawal of most of its 80,000 troops after only 5,000 had left Chechnya; instead, the Kremlin said it was sending troops back to the war-shattered region.

A year after Russian military commanders declared victory there, federal losses continue to mount at a rate of one soldier killed and several wounded every day in increasingly bold hit-and-run attacks by small groups of guerrillas. The military and police have responded by sealing off entire villages and rounding up everyone suspected of rebel sympathies. Many never come back.

Officials of the pro-Moscow Chechen government, widely unpopular in the region for its inability to protect civilians from the roundups, have become targets of the rebels, too - dozens have been killed or wounded in recent attacks; others have resigned in fear.

Frustrated by the continued heavy casualties, General Gennady Troshev, commander of Russian troops in Chechnya, this month called for public execution of rebels. It was Troshev who declared one year ago that ''the war, as such, is over.'' Now, he is calling for Russian troops to conduct sweeps for rebels outside Chechnya itself, in the region to the west.

Following a summit meeting with President Bush in which he responded to American criticism of Russia's military campaign, Putin told reporters Monday that he is ''getting tired'' of explaining what he's up to in Chechnya and that it would take ''a dumb person'' not to understand the Kremlin's actions, the Associated Press reported.

But many Russian politicians themselves are having trouble making sense of the Chechnya campaign. One of them is Alexei Arbatov, deputy chairman of the Russian parliament's defense committee, who was wounded when a military helicopter carrying him was hit by rebel gunfire near the border of Chechnya.

Arbatov told reporters that the army's presence in Chechnya, and the recurring violence against civilians, were turning local people against Moscow. He said he was surprised to learn that troops were having more difficulty controlling Chechnya's plains than its remote mountain areas, and that rebels were moving freely across the republic's borders.

In order to defeat the rebels, Arbatov said, federal troops must find a way to distinguish civilians from rebel fighters.

''Their mission is to show the population that federal authority is better for them and to win the population over to our side,'' Arbatov said in a recent interview. ''Only then will we be able to rob the militants of their base of support and be done with this war and with this illegal separatist armed movement.''

But the reality, said Aslanbek Aslakhanov, the representative from Chechnya in the Lower House of the Russian parliament, is that ''the army treats the population as a potential enemy.''

On Wednesday and Thursday last week, 20 civilians were reported murdered by troops in Chechnya. In an unusually swift response, Russian security forces rounded up 19 soldiers suspected of involvement in the killings, which human rights groups complain have been routine. Authorities have in the past questioned soldiers in connection with massacres, but so far only one officer has been put on trial, for the murder of a Chechen girl.

''You can destroy the population, but you cannot win their sympathy by these methods,'' Aslakhanov said.

The Kremlin's plan for Chechnya used to be that with major cities and towns under control, troops would crush remaining rebel bands and round up their leaders. But despite constant security sweeps, the top rebel commanders remain at large. The head of Russia's Federal Security Service, Nikolai Patrushev, said last month that troops could not get to the leaders without risking heavy losses.

Rather than call the previous policy a failure, Patrushev suggested that the Kremlin's mission in Chechnya had changed. No longer was Moscow's goal to kill or arrest rebels; instead, the idea was to ''prevent Chechnya from being a base from which terrorists could launch attacks.'' Putin echoed this sentiment in his interview Monday.

Whether this new strategy has been successful is debatable. Rebel attacks continue. On Tuesday, three car bombs in Chechnya killed three civilians and wounded 34, adding to the untold civilian casualties.

The Kremlin admits to 3,096 Russian deaths since the campaign began in October 1999; independent observers suggest the toll might be double that.

Meanwhile, the cost of the war has risen. Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent military analyst in Moscow, recently estimated that operations in Chechnya had cost $2 billion in 2000 alone. That is almost a third of the entire Russian defense budget. Clearly, the money was not coming from the budget, but from the windfall that Russia, an exporter of oil and gas, reaped from high world energy prices.

''But if oil prices tank, where is that going to come from?'' asked Fiona Hill, a Russia analyst at the Brookings Foundation. ''Who's going to suffer in Russia to keep this war going in Chechnya?''

Support for the war is starting to slip. At the end of 1999, two-thirds of Russians approved of a military solution, but a recent survey by pollster Yury Levada found that 58 percent now support halting the fighting and holding peace talks with the rebels.

Still, Hill suggested that the Kremlin may prefer a costly, low-scale conflict to the alternatives. The Russians are not willing to grant the Chechens independence. That, they believe, would re-create the situation that existed before the current conflict, when Chechnya became a haven for kidnappers and gangs who launched raids on Russian territory.*

The Kremlin has publicly ruled out peace talks with the separatists' fugitive president, Aslan Maskhadov, and top rebel commanders, whom it blames for the kidnappings and raids.

Unable to win the war on the ground, the Kremlin has tried to take control of its media in an attempt to win the propaganda war, by muting dissent and sanitizing what news gets through.

''Add economic difficulties to the dead-end policy in Chechnya and Putin's rating would begin to melt,'' veteran Moscow political observer Otto Latsis wrote in the English-language Russia Journal recently. ''The people in his administration seem to have realized this danger and to have decided that if it is to happen, the later people find out what is going on, the better.''

By David Filipov, The Boston Globe
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.

* Yes, we have heard that 1000 times. But it's exactly the other way round. "The Russians" (the Russian leadership) established a situation in which crime prospered, and they directly supported the worst kidnappers in order to weaken Chechnya and to create the justification for another war. By the end of the current war they'll possibly have learnt to leave Chechnya alone, and a situation "justifying" a third war might be avoided. - Norbert Strade