Ordinary Russians wake up and go to sleep these days listening to news updates on the war in Chechnya. As the bloodletting goes on, despite the Kremlin's post-election face lift, more and more Russians are wondering why Washington has gone mute. PNS associate editor Andrew Meier has lived in and reported from Russia for U.S. media since the early 1990s. He is currently on an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship to write about Russia's Near Abroad.

MOSCOW -- The Kremlin wears a friendlier face these days, thanks to Boris Yeltsin's recent victory at the ballot box. The so-called "Party of War" -- the hawkish ministers who pushed Russia's forces into the war in Chechnya -- has been booted out of the inner circle. The new tag team of ex-General Alexandr Lebed (who talks a tough anti-mafiya schtick) and the liberal economist Anatoly Chubais (who looks and sounds like an enlightened European) are said to share the Tsar's ear.

Yet contrary to popular belief and the absence of blaring headlines in the West, the battle for Chechnya still rages. Launched twenty months ago, when Russian tanks rolled into the capital city of Grozny, the war has claimed 30,000 lives and sent hundreds of thousands fleeing. Last week it entered a new phase when Russian forces, after a brief post-election hiatus, launched another military bombardment. This week Chechen resistance fighters swarmed into Grozny, braving Russian helicopter gunships.

The question Russians are asking is: Why is Washington silent in the face of this continued bloodletting? For over two decades American presidents forced standoffs with Soviet leaders over the repression of dissidents like Andrei Sakharov. When his wife Yelena Bonner was refused an exit visa to go to Italy for an eye operation, it became an international incident discussed at the highest levels. But somehow in the post-cold war logic of U.S.-Russian relations, when the Kremlin murders 30,000 of its own citizens, it doesn't warrant a hoot from President Clinton.

For their part, Russians have come to loathe the Chechen imbroglio. Last spring Yeltsin garnered accolades from Western leaders for his remarkable turnaround in the polls. But that turnaround was primarily due to the dramatic signing on June 20 of a cease-fire with the Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov in the Kremlin. If at the time a few hard liners among the resurgent Communists and nationalist patriots backed the boys in Chechnya, today you'd be hard put to find any ordinary Russian willing to support it.

Even the Army has turned against the war. Yeltsin's new Defense Minister, Gen. Igor Rodionov --nicknamed the "butcher of Tbilisi" for his commanding role in the introduction of Soviet troops in the Georgian capitol in April 1989 -- has declared his distaste for the Chechen operation. "The troops will come home soon," he recently vowed.

They'd love to. They are demoralized and weary. An 18 year old deserter recently told me he'd never held a machine gun before being sent to Grozny. There are frequent reports that the Russians are hawking their weapons and ammunition to the Chechen rebels. Human rights advocates who have traveled at great personal risk through the Chechen countryside report that Russian soldiers often loot the villages they control.

Virtually everyone now accepts the impossibility of victory as Moscow defines it -- "securing the peace and preserving territorial integrity." Yet Washington has dutifully condoned Moscow's stated goal in the war. Where is the moral outrage President Clinton so eloquently invoked when he sent peace keepers to Somalia, or to liberate Haiti, to secure the Dayton agreement in Bosnia? Can it be, Russians wonder, that in this election year the American public's indifference to foreign affairs has paralyzed the president?

Russians may be sickened by the Chechen bloodbath but unlike President Clinton, there is no way they can avoid it. The Russian news media won't let them. Day in and day out, the media have kept the war on the front burner of their concerns. "Today in Chechnya..." begins the news at every hour. It wakes them up on the radio in the morning. It invades their living rooms after dinner on the evening news. For all the slavish support Russian reporters gave Yeltsin during the election campaign, NTV, the largest private TV network in the former Soviet Union, braved his wrath to put scathing reports from the front lines on the air night after night.

In the second long summer of the Chechen war, ordinary Russians know there is no exit strategy, just more dead to count each day. In the muted logic of the much-ballyhooed new world order, it seems Washington isn't even counting.