YELTSIN CLAIMS VICTORY IN BATTLE WITH CHECHENS.

Byline: Michael Specter The New York Times

After a wild battle that raged through the night and left bodies scattered across the snow-covered plains, President Boris Yeltsin said Thursday night that the Russian army had finally managed to overcome a group of Chechen rebels who had been trapped in a village near here and freed many of their hostages.

The cost for Russia in carnage and raw humiliation was enormous. In a final violent exchange, after days of suffering relentless bombardment, some surviving guerrillas broke out of the village of Pervomayskoye early Thursday morning and, aided by scores of comrades who slipped across the frozen Terek River from Chechnya, attacked Russians who surrounded them.

"We are being shot at!" radioed one frantic sentry on guard at the neighboring village of Sovietskoye about a mile away, as the rebels attacked in the dead of night. "Send everyone to help us!" Within minutes the entire village was awakened to the sound of gunfire and scores of desperate residents ran fleeing into the falling snow.

Most of these remaining rebels were apparently killed in this final battle, but some - possibly including their leader - escaped.

In the Black Sea on Thursday evening, a Turkish ferry that was seized by pro-Chechen hijackers two days ago with more than 200 passengers aboard was steaming toward Istanbul, and the situation remained volatile.

And in the Chechen capital of Grozny, where a third hostage incident took place, searchers were looking for 30 workers reportedly seized from an electrical power plant by guerrillas Tuesday, Russian officials said.

Here along the Chechen border, it was almost impossible to assess the number of casualties in the nine-day hostage crisis, including the number of hostages killed. On Thursday, a spokesman for the government said the military started bombing the village when it received word that all hostages had been executed. On Thursday, Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin said that only 16 of the more than 100 captives originally held in the village were missing and that the rest are alive.

The government's credibility has taken a severe beating in the last week, as it announced and then retracted successive accounts of the conflict. Only a few hostages have been allowed to meet reporters, and journalists have been prevented from entering the ruined village.

The Interior Ministry said that 26 Russian soldiers had died in the fighting around the village over the past week and that 93 more had been wounded. They also said that the 153 Chechen rebels died, but conceded that others, possibly including their leader, Salman Raduyev, escaped through the woods into Chechnya. Machine gun fire continued steadily here Thursday night, as the Russians apparently searched for any stragglers.

"It was a well-trained, serious military unit," said the chief of the Federal Security Service, Mikhail Barsukov, who Wednesday gave the order for a withering rocket assault that left the village a cluster of charred shells. "We have to admit that they stood for their beliefs like fanatics."

An almost certain result of the hostage seizure is more war between Russia and the separatists of Chechnya. Yeltsin, who has increasingly surrounded himself with hard-liners including his new chief of staff, is unlikely now to look for a peaceful solution to the war that has steadily eaten away at his popularity at home and his respect abroad.